Fresh and Exciting

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It is tempting to state that the title of this movie is the funniest thing about it, but that would be inaccurate: it is the ONLY funny thing about it. It is also a very misleading title: after the first 10 minutes, the dead babysitter is forgotten about until the very last scene. It has a drab look (it looks made for TV, it's surprising that it got theatrical distribution), an amazingly aimless script, and dismal direction. There is nothing remotely believable, witty, and most importantly funny, about any of it. The character "Kenny" deserves to be shot. Ed O' Neill (as Al Bundy) joked about how terrible "Dutch" (which I haven't seen) was a couple of times on "Married With Children", I wonder why Christina Applegate (who tones down her attractiveness considerably here) never mentioned this movie on that show. Maybe she would rather forget it ever happened. 0.5 out of 4 stars.

So Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (AKA The Secret to My Success 2: Electric Boogaloo) is one of the most shameless wannabee ripoffs I've seen. You can tell from the image that this movie has on IMDb. The pull quote from the top of the image reads "Its Home Alone Times Five"...Whoever wrote that should be stripped of the right to free speech. It wants you to think that this movie has something to do with a bunch of kids and the fact that they have to deal with being "home alone". But it doesn't. There's 5 kids and the movie only deals with 2 of them. I say that because they're the only ones who have an arc. One of them plays baseball, one of them had a girlfriend at 11 years old but then didn't for reasons we don't know or care, and one of them fell off a roof. Wacky. So it begins with a quick intro to the two main characters, the oldest sister and brother. The brother is a stoner, and the sister...seems to be just a normal girl with normal problems one would have at her age. RANT ABOUT THE MOM: just about the worst person in the world. Seriously? You leave your 5 kids alone for 2 months? This is a premise no one can identify with. Because...WTF. She asked the babysitter if she knows there are 5 kids 1 minute before she leaves...So I'm going to skip over the babysitter part. Because its not important. The movie's title is about her dying, and its not the least bit important. There's no drama from this situation. You figure it can be almost like Weekend At Beernies, where they have to play like she's still alive to people. Like a relative comes by to check on them or whatever and they have to make it seem like she's there. But no, there's two scenes on the phone where the mom's asks where she is and they're just like "uhhhhhhhh shes gone".OK, so Kelly Bundy needs a job now to pay for food. Which is the only thing the movie shows as a need when the mom is away. Apparently the big house they live in is devoid of food when the mom leaves for 2 months. You figure this could be an amount that a fast food job could handle. But Kelly says F that I'm too good for this ish. So then she try's to get a high class job at a fashion...place. And she gets one under false pretense. But there's some mean lady trying to bring her down. This is pretty much the stakes of this movie, and why this movie fails. If she gets exposed, there is no bad thing that would happen. She would just lose her job, and her mom would come back a few days later and life would go back to normal. You could say that she was embezzling money and she would have gotten in trouble for that, but it's like 3 grand...maybe probation...not something a movie should be based around. Blah blah, the other kids make appearances here and there...blah blah, the stoner wonders if this life of "Rock and Roll!!!" is whats best...blah blah wait, is that David Duchovny? What is he doing here? He could have been written out and the movie would have preformed exactly the same. I guess I should just end this thing now. So Veronica Corningstone is going to save the company with her fashion sense. It has never been established that she has a superior fashion ability. She just grabs some clothes, and off she goes. You could have made this make sense in 30 seconds with a scene earlier in the movie with her displaying some sort of fashion opinion at a high end clothes store or something. Showing she has some sort of untapped potential at this. But nah.She for some reason decides to hold a fashion show at her house. You can debate that it was to save money which she didn't have, but that party looked like it cost a s-ton. This was a perfect opportunity to give all the kids a quick arc to show that they can do chores now. At the party everything goes fine til the boyfriend shows up. I didn't mention him before because he's not really important (they could have made him important but there is a 30 minute stretch where he's not mentioned or appears). He sees a house with 50 cars parked in front, doesn't recognize the signs that this might not be the best time to confess his love over a loudspeaker, and messes everything up. Doesn't matter because the Mom shows up and everything's exposed. Which results in nothing. Nothing at all... Listen, the point is that this movie has no purpose. It is two movies rolled into one, resulting in nothing. You can do a movie about a dead babysitter, and the crazy mishaps resulting in that, or you can do a movie about a girl trying to fake her way into high society...which is what they did. The problem is that we don't have any background or connection with this main character and the danger she's taking in lying about this job she's in. She's just doing it to make some food money. And she'll be OK in a couple of days when mommy gets home. And this is the director's fault. Somewhere he should have put more meaning in the characters. Giving them more of a reason to be better, or establishing that they are crappy to begin with. The older brother was this, but was done with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Its your job to give this movie purpose and drive, and it pretty much lacks it all.

How could you NOT like this movie! I am watching it right now, and it has inspired me to write a review, and hopefully give it more recognition and more importantly, a higher rating!!!! Kids home alone with no parents, free to do whatever, but also trying to maintain living! Each character has their own stereotype- Walter the youngest: a handful, Melissa: the disobedient tomboy, Kenny: the headbanging rocker drop-out, Zachary: the calm, but sneaky love struck teen and Sue-Ellen: the responsible, yet hip mother of her siblings. This movie is full of much excitement and a great plot. You cannot go past this underrated classic!

This really should've been 2 movies. There are 2 great premises here that are almost completely unrelated that are just squashed together into 1 not-so-good film. We have the hilarious slapstick comedy of covering up the death of an elderly babysitter, and a woman trying to find a way to save the company she works for (which is a movie that I personally wouldn't have cared for, but probably would've made a great chick flick), both of which could've easily carried themselves over an hour and a half each.Instead, all we get is a half-hour of comedy and an hour of boring Yuppie-ville Corporate America, with the plot of the first half-hour poking it's head every so often, mercilessly trying to remind us that we're supposed to be watching a comedy. But just as quickly as those every-so-often's come up, they disappear back into the void.And they should've done away with the 'no money, gotta get a job' plot device, as that was pretty much what killed the rest of this film. They could've developed a lot more comedy just out of them say... having a party and trashing the house, or relatives come looking for the babysitter, or mother comes home early, or from the fact that they should've just called an ambulance in the first place seeing as how the babysitter really did die of natural causes and they wouldn't have been in any trouble anyway, or any number of possible plot devices that could've been so much funnier than Christina Applegate parading around in Yuppie-land. And as for that part of the film being it's own movie, this section has a lot more detail than the first half. Just add a bit more character development to the supporting cast, and bam, you got that film.The acting is overall fairly decent though. Christina Applegate is definitely convincing as both the valley girl and the yuppie. Keith Coogan as Kenny and the hilarious pranks that him and his gang pull are sadly underused in my opinion, although his transformation from stoner slacker to Julia Child-obsessed chef throughout the film is one of the best parts of the film. Josh Charles (whom everybody would remember as anchor Dan Rydell from the show Sports Night) as the boyfriend Bryan does a fairly decent job here as well. Eda Reiss Merin as the elderly babysitter had me scared stiff. The actress also was sadly underused before the character's untimely death. I mean, come on. The title of the movie is based on this character. Had that been it's own movie (forsaking the Corporate America bit, as I suggested earlier), they could've developed the character a lot more. Maybe have her dole out some worse embarrassments and harsher punishments to the children before her death.Most of the actors in the latter part of the film were pretty stiff. The actress who played Carolyn should've been replaced, as it seemed that she read her lines like a wannabe actress in a poorly written commercial. I was however surprised to see David Duchovny (long before his triumphs on The X-Files & Californication) with the worst hair cut the 80's had to offer, and stiff as a board in the acting department.So basically that's it. 2 good premises, but one overall lousy film.