Sorry, this movie sucks

best movie i've ever seen.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Molly and Allan Sheridan leave their baby with their nanny Diana Julian. She's a druid who sacrifices the baby to worship the tree. She and the baby disappear. Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate Sterling (Carey Lowell) move from Chicago to Santa Monica. Phil has a new advertising job and Kate has a new baby. They hire nanny Camilla Grandier (Jenny Seagrove) after the one they wanted has a deadly accident. Camilla and the baby get chased into the woods by three thugs. The rapists cut Camilla but the tree and wolves kill the thugs. The neighbor Ned Runcie takes a liking to Camilla.William Friedkin tries his hand on another horror. The problem is that it's never scary. The characters are rarely compelling. The tree effects seem second rate. There is little to no tension since the young couple has no rooting interest. They are very bland. The most memorable thing that Jenny Seagrove does is get naked and get into the tree makeup. There are unreasonable character traits. For example, Kate is much too compassionate to Camilla when Phil starts making accusations. Kate should be much more of a mamma bear. At the hospital, they don't call in security and instead they run home where inevitably Camilla will follow. There are plenty of wrong turns and uninspired roads in this Friedkin side trip.

"The Guardian" centers on a young bourgeois couple who move to the Los Angeles suburbs upon the arrival of their newborn son; seeking a nanny, as both husband and wife plan on continuing to work, they hire the mysterious Camilla (Jenny Seagrove), a polite Engliish woman who very quickly becomes part of the family— that is, until they discover she's actually a druid Hamadryad who sacrifices newborns to a sacred tree in the woods near their house.When discussing this film, William Friedkin has been quoted as saying that he wanted to "make a fairytale for adults," and I think that's the most appropriate lens under which to view this film— anyone trying to take issue with the film's whimsical nature or its lack of "seriousness" is missing the point here. While "The Guardian" is a flawed film in multiple ways, it seems to get the most flack for its relatively absurdist plot. There's an evil nanny sacrificing babies to a tree, and the tree periodically comes to life to ward off and kill anyone who means harm— I get it, it's a bit out of the realm of reality. At the same time, Friedkin's horror landmark "The Exorcist", filmed seventeen years before, concerns a twelve-year-old possessed girl who vomits green slime, whose head spins around, and who masturbates with a crucifix; granted, I don't know what your daily life is like, but for me, that's just about equally outside the realm of what I call "reality". It's not that I'm equating Friedkin's work on "The Guardian" with that on "The Exorcist"— "The Exorcist" is clearly the better film— but criticizing this film on the grounds of its fantastical plot is not only fallacious— it's hypocritical. Despite what you may or may not make of its plot, the greatest strength that "The Guardian" has is its classy cinematography and striking visuals. There are amazing shots in this film; shadows of the trees on the bedroom ceiling come to life, and Camilla's ventures into the atmospheric forest are beautifully and hauntingly photographed. For what it's worth, "The Guardian" also boasts some impressive "Evil Dead"-esque special effects that still hold up today even, and take center stage at the end of the film. For a film made in 1989, the special effects behind the anthropomorphic tree are especially impressive, and also quite sinister; the faces of infants embossed in tree bark are nothing short of chilling.There are flaws here, however, the most prominent (and surprisingly least discussed) being the underdevelopment of Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell's characters; granted, they are secondary to Camilla, but their vitality to the plot begs for something more, as both of them feel pretty hollow. Jenny Seagrove is the film's highlight as the mysterious and sensuous Camilla— this is her film more than anyone else's, and her turn as a tree-morphing villainess makes the film worth a watch alone. Another obtrusive issue here is the film's sloppy editing, which makes for a somewhat jarring viewing experience at times. The choppiness that seems to arise throughout the film isn't a deliberate stylistic touch either, but rather just a side effect of poor editing. It certainly doesn't kill the film, but it does make it appear a bit unnecessarily rough around the edges.Overall, "The Guardian" is, I think, an unjustly hated film— perhaps even misunderstood in some regard. It's no masterpiece, and is arguably one of Friedkin's weakest films to date, but when you take into consideration its unusual fairytale tinges and the sophisticated cinematography on display, there is something legitimately worthwhile here for genre fans. People call absurdism on this film, but I say nay. Like Friedkin said, it's a fairytale for adults— an uneven, shoddily edited, and perhaps half-baked fairytale, but a fairytale no less. Most memorable moments: the architect neighbor following Camilla to the tree, and the high-speed levitation chase through the forest at the end. 7/10.

Jenny Seagrove, whose beauty was positively pelagic in "Local Hero", is here a nanny hired by an upscale yuppie couple (Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell). She's still striking, sinewy and phocine, but the movie makes no sense whatever. It incorporates all kinds of generic devices, mostly from "The Omen," but, really, from all over the slasher area. The director, William Friedkin, has turned into one of those folk artists who assembles pieces of scrap iron and other detritus and welds them together into a sculpture so abstract that it loses all meaning except that of an assemblage of pieces of misshapen junk. And this from the guy who gave us "The Exorcist." Is it really necessary to outline this so-called plot? Okay, but briefly.Seagrove has these supernatural powers -- surprise! -- and has a pack of wolves to act as instruments of her will. She causes the death of the yuppies' first nanny choice, gets the job, moves in, and begins to take over the child. It's not clear why she has designs on the baby. Something to do with a sacred tree. She can cleanse her body of wounds at the tree and apparently sacrifices babies to it. Maybe the movie should have been called "Yggdrasil." That would have been the most original thing about it.You want nonsense? Here's nonsense. The baby is unnaturally quiescent. It respondeth not to stimuli. The baby is in a room in a hospital with a doctor bending over it ("maybe encephalitis", he mutters) and the two anxious parents clutching each other in the background. The nanny enters wreathlike into the room and goes to the little baby container. She stares down at the kid, murmurs "I can make you immortal," unplugs the leads from the EKG, and begins to walk out with the wrapped-up tike. The parents yank the kid from Seagrove's arms, push her to the floor, and scoot screeching out the door. So they're in a big hospital corridor, with docs and nurses and other staff walking around, and what do they do? They RUSH OUT and GO HOME! That's so Seagrove and the wolves or coyotes can find them and harass them further because it's not yet time for the movie to end and a few more shock scenes are required to make the quota.Two good points. (1) A couple of shots of Jenny Seagrove nude in the bathtub and being cured by the tree and standing by a brook in a moonlit glade. Very artistic, I thought. (2) The production design, which really IS good, and the photography. A pop-up illustration in a child's fairy tale book, evoking the frighteningly prickly forest that Hansel and Gretl stumble through, turns into the real thing. And that shot of Seagrove in the moonlight by the brook really IS impressive, despite the fact that you would search forever without finding a non-cultivated tree anywhere in the neighborhood of Los Angeles, never mind a spooky woodland. The rooms are unobtrusively decorated with prickly plants and various cacti. Nicely done and giving evidence of having some thought put into it, which the screenplay lacks.

Somewhat creepy horror movie with a supernatural edge to it, kind of a more horror oriented "Hand that Rocks the Cradle". Basically, a couple with their first child hires a nanny with a very dark and disturbing secret. She has chosen this baby for a reason and it is not to simply make it hers. As far as horror movies it is somewhat good, it has some gore, a couple of tense scenes and some nudity. However, if you watch the cut version of this movie the whole thing changes to the point almost all the scares and creepy stuff is taken out. They seem to completely edit over the first scene involving the baby taken to the tree, a scene later with the mother makes it out that the child survived and is safe and sound. The regular version is not so chipper. The ending is screwed up to as it ends earlier and they basically cut out the final scene. I realize that you want to cut out some stuff so you can show your movie on the happy time family network, but in the end you should not edit a movie to the point its plot and meaning change. So for an okay horror movie with some creepy scenes and such give this movie a shot, for a pedestrian movie with basically no scares and all creepiness removed try and find the cut version of the film.