Very Cool!!!

Absolutely Brilliant!

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I remember being in high school my senior year and "The Guardian" was released to home video in 1990 but the year I saw it was 1992. I think also around that time "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" was also released after it's run in theaters. It was the usual weekend ritual, two movies and a Nintendo/Super Nintendo game from Movie Warehouse and nothing else to do but veg out.So I rented both "Guardian" and "Hand" as my movies for that "Evil Nanny" themed weekend and watched "The Guardian" first. I must say that the movie is one of the most underrated horror films ever made. Friedkin's first horror film since "Exorcist" 17 years after. At first the eerie score let's the viewer know it is a scary film with a brief story about druids worshiping trees and offering sacrifices to them, an obvious mutilation of the druid's customs of nature worship as the antagonists is rather a forest demon or possible succubus.Now, some what of a spoiler warning: We see what transpires at the beginning while a boy reads "Hansel & Gretel", giving the viewer an idea of the nanny's intentions after his parents leave him and his sister with her, as "Hansel & Gretel" is a classic Brothers Grimm story about children abandoned and taken in by a stranger with intentions of sacrifice.Jenny Seagrove's portrayal of Camilla shows that she keeps her maternal instincts to herself while caring for the child but hides her true intent and anyone who discovers her true form will not live long or be heard from again, let alone anyone who crosses her path like the witch in "Hansel & Gretel" (Of course, this is the classic horror concept of a witch and not modern day pagans or wiccans... or druids).This film is hated by the critics but loved by many a film nut. I like it but not enough for a full score because it moves kind of quickly. It wasn't a slasher or a big sfx filled film but it holds up because it is scary and at one point you are routing for Camilla and then routing for the parents.I can see one reason why the critics hated it, the story is easy to follow. And another reason they hate it is because Friedkin knew he couldn't give us another "Exorcist" and horror was not really his specialty when it came to previous works like "The French Connection", "Sorcerer" and "Crusing". It is still a movie I enjoy watching every now and then and I think you would like it too, but don't take my word for it as other users have their opinions.And I thought the Kite Eating tree in the peanuts comics gave me nightmares.

Busy career-oriented, Phil and Kate decide to get a nanny for their two-week old newborn, however unbeknownst to them the one they pick, Carmilla, is a Hamadryad (google it) who feeds newborn babies to her favorite tree who happens to love her back, so that's mutual. Yea it's as ridicules as it sounds.What is, for all intents, simply a watchable gory b-movie schlock fest, would be an enjoyable enough time-killer if not for the mere fact that I hold William Friedkin of a higher caliber than that. With the sheer amount of brilliant films that he's made, I can't really help but think of this one as a misstep, one that turned out as a guilty pleasure, but a misstep nonetheless.My Grade: CEye Candy: Jenny Seagrove shows T&A multiple times. . Carey Lowell gets topless (might be a body double though)

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.

THE GUARDIAN seems like one of the more average achievements of master Friedkin–an urban Gothic tale, a grim fairy tale fostering the audiences' fear of the woods.Jenny Seagrove was a fine beauty and an average but interesting actress; here she gets to play 'Camilla', name of LeFanuesque resonance, and at least she offers something to glimpse at in her few nude scenes. The action keeps linear, the treatment will appear like quite unsubtle. A young and not very likable couple has a newborn son and hires a babysitter to look after him—the babysitter is Mrs. Seagrove. Very quickly Friedkin reveals that Jenny is a freak.