• Wide Release
• Director: Tom Laughlin
• Written by: Tom Laughlin, James E. McLarty, George E. Carey
• Running Time: 75 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating: R - Restricted
• Cast: George E. Carey, Patricia Wymer, Anne Bellamy, Kathy Williams, Robert Tessier, Ken Hooker, Ted C. Frank, James E. McLarty, Sheri Jackson, Warren Rose, Doris Rose, Ruth Noonan

Western-action stud circa 1960, Tom Laughlin, best known as Billy Jack from the butt-kickingly good Billy Jack series, takes his forth spin in the director’s chair with the schlocky “The Babysitter” and, in keeping, modifies his name to reflect his enthusiasm for the project. Calling himself Don Henderson, a bland alias if there ever was one, it’s kind of surprising that Laughlin might want to shun credit for this film considering that it’s really not all that bad – even by schlocky “babysitter-movie” subgenre standards. In fact, this is really quite enjoyable. Not sure about you but I'd happily add "The Babysitter" on my resume long before I'd consider adding "Billy Jack Goes to Washington". Or maybe it's just me.

George E. Carey plays Deputy District Attorney George Maxwell, a man who has become increasingly frustrated by his static lifestyle. To make matters worse, the surprise arrival of a newborn son has only aggravated the situation, as his frosty, bitter wife Edith (Anne Bellamy) has become even more standoffish and scornful in recent weeks. The fact that they haven’t had sex in months, something George confesses early in the film, speaks to the emotional and physical divide between the two – substituted by endless games of Bridge with people they can barely stand. Things change one night when their new babysitter, Candy Wilson (Patricia Wymer), arrives on their doorstep. Sexy blonde-haired Candy embodies the 60’s era free-spirit hippy lifestyle and five minutes after bidding the unhappy couple goodbye, Candy is calling her friends to come over for a naked, grass-smoking, music-playing good time. Yeah, groovy man. Later, after the exhausted couple arrive home, near missing the hippies scrambling out the back door, Edith demands that George drive Candy home. Looking for further kicks for the night, Candy (appropriately named, it seems), with lots of bare leg and sultry glances, manages to seduce the sexually repressed George -- a man easily twice her age. Afterwards, George is surprised when Candy hints that she’d like to see him again. Candy’s need for quick, trivial kicks begins to evolve into something more important, namely genuine (but, thankfully, not over-powering as that would be a whole other movie) feelings for George.

As things begin to escalate sexually between Candy and George, another more interesting strand of a story begins to unravel, as a biker moll, Julia Freeman (the gorgeous Kathy Williams), attempts to blackmail George into releasing her sadistic biker boyfriend Laurence Mackey (Robert Tessier), who's case he is prosecuting. After introducing Julia, the film jumps backwards several days in an attempt to situate her cause into the fibre of the story, and with how it relates to a brutal rape scenario that played out, seemingly without context, in the film’s opening minutes. One of the biker rapists from the opener, it turns out, is actually Julia’s boyfriend Mackey, who viciously tied a woman to a tree, slapped her around and even carved his name into her chest with his knife. It makes perfect sense that Julia, his girl, would want to see him getting off. Apparently he makes her heart flutter when she rides on the back of his bike or some such shit. Sadly, she has no leverage with the attorney, well, that is until one of her biker pals suggests that George’s teenage daughter, Joan (Sheri Jackson – also known as Colleen Murphy from “Alice in Acidland” fame), might be a lesbian.

The wheels start turning in her head and before long Julia has a scheme in place to photograph George’s daughter in a compromising position with another girl and use it as blackmail fodder. As an old high school friend of Joan’s, Julia has no trouble segueing back into her life, arriving in Joan’s Olympic-sized pool one sunny afternoon just in time to catch her getting hot and heavy with another girl. When Candy arrives later in the day to spend some alone time with George, it isn’t long before Julia is jettisoning the lesbian photos idea in favour of something more lascivious. Julia is a smart cookie, figuring out Candy and George's game mere minutes after spotting the couple alone. Julia wisely sings just the right manipulative tunes in order to maneuver the various people around her to get what she wants. And what she wants is some candid photos of George and Candy screwing. Considering that horny-goose George can’t seem to keep it in his pants, and Candy can’t seem to keep her legs closed, Julia has no problem snapping up a bevy of scandalous photos.

Without giving too much away, George quickly finds his world coming apart as Julia’s blackmail scheme places him (and, strangely, the audience) in a very precarious moral position. Salvage his married life and career by deliberately throwing the case and putting a psychotic maniac back on the street, or stand firm and endure whatever negative consequences roll his way? Whichever choice he makes, nobody wins. What will he do? It’s interesting how this film can take a character that is, on the surface, a liar and an adulterer, and actually make him a sympathetic character. “The Babysitter” somehow is able to do it. When he tells his wife to “shut up” midway into the film, we feel oddly happy for him. He’s not a bully in so much as he is just a man at the end of his rope. It's like he's finally found a pair, and the audience understands this. Equally interesting is the bumpy way the film treats the Julia character. I found it really difficult to hate her, even though I know that I am hard-wired to do just that. For whatever reason, I actually felt for her. Strangely similar to George’s own life-predicament, Julia’s reasons for blackmailing him speak more to a woman blind to the reality of her life and those she chooses to love (one at the end of her proverbial rope), rather than a malevolent evil personality. The scene where she hesitates taking a picture of Joan in the sauna with another girl, I thought, spoke to something good about her character; however, the fogged glass may have played a bigger role in that decision. The final shot of her, tied to a chair, hair chopped off, bloodied and tortured, eerily paralleling the opening shot of the girl in peril from the opening, was less enjoyable for me to watch as I expect it was intended to have been. As much as I wanted to celebrate the wicked witch getting burned, I couldn’t. I felt terrible for her.

George E. Carey and Tom Laughlin would team up a few years later to direct and produce “Weekend With the Babysitter”, a poorly conceived sequel with virtually no connection whatsoever to “The Babysitter”. Susan Romen would replace Patricia Wymer in the role, but it was a poor turn as nobody could outshine the lovely, effervescent Ms. Wymer (1969’s “The Witchmaker”). Sadly, Patricia would work in only one other film, “The Young Graduates”, before opting out of acting altogether in 1971. Appearing in a whopping 15 films in just two years, raven-haired workaholic Kathy Williams (Julia) would follow up her role in this film by playing another character last-named Freeman (Grace Freeman) in “Love Camp 7”, a film that proved so controversial that it was banned in a half dozen countries upon its release. Like Wymer, she would make only one other movie before disappearing into relative obscurity. Rarely used but distinguished leading actor, George E. Carey (1974’s “So Evil, My Sister”), proved with “The Babysitter” that refined performances could arise from even the sleaziest of productions. His entire body of work seemed to prove that, I guess you could say, as he was often relegated to schlocky b-productions. Carey is in fine form here, even when he’s smirking at his suddenly obedient wife in the final frame -- clearly basking in the knowledge that there will be no consequences for his actions.

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