Saturday, October 17, 2020

A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting - Light Hearted, Kid-Friendly Movie for Halloween

In this Halloween month, there were quite a number of horror movies released on various streaming platforms. Last week, I saw a horror comedy movie on Netflix and this time, I tried a seemingly fun movie based on its brief synopsis. And what's it all about? I'll go straight to it now.

Brief Story Line

A young high school student Kelly Ferguson (Tamara Smart - Artemis Fowl etc) was given the task to babysit for her mother's boss' child Jacob (Ian Ho) on the Halloween night. However, during her care, Jacob was abducted by the Boogeyman (Tom Felton - Stratton, Rise of the Planet of the Apes etc).

Aided by another babysitter named Liz Lerue (Oona Laurence - Bad Moms and its sequel etc) who apparently was part of secret babysitter society who protect children from monster attacks, Kelly tried to save Jacob and get him back home before his mother returned.

So what would happen to Kelly and Liz? Find them all in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Well just like I predicted, this movie was light and was not scary, but it was indeed fun. The early part of the movie felt like a Disney movie and I like the fact that the main cast who were high school students really looked young and realistic for their age, not like some mature looking actors/actresses who played teenagers.

The plot of this movie was very simple, but as the story progressed, there seemed to be some complexity, especially when we were shown the Order of Babysitters. Oh, that was also when it was more fun as we were introduced with other members such as Berna (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson), the babysitter in training Cassie (Lynn Masako Cheng) and Curtis (Ty Consiglio) who provided scenes that were refreshing.

The background story of Kelly was also a great way to provide some context and made it convincing for me to see her seamlessly working together with Liz. There were also the occasional teenager's plot which serve as a nice supplement to this movie. As a horror genre, there were some monsters shown in here but as I said earlier, they were not scary. Even the three "toadies" were hilarious to watch rather than terrifying (which I believed was the intention). The special effects to create the monsters were quite good and they looked real enough.

Towards the end of the film, there was a strong sense that it has the potential to continue with further sequels. After further reading on the internet, it turned out that the film was based on a three-part books of the same title written by Joe Ballarini who happens to be the writer for this movie as well. So perhaps there will be sequel and we can see more of these babysitters. Btw, there was no mid or post end credit scenes.  

Overall this was a light hearted, kid-friendly fantasy-horror movie with some fun references to the monsters and would be a safe option to watch horror on TV. Due to its light take, I do not believe horror hard core fans would like this one and probably would feel this to be a bit childish, but if you happen to like this kind of genre, then I believe you should be able to have fun.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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