Sadly Over-hyped

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.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

How typical! Having turned out the delightful, The Babysitter (1969) the director and writer/star get together to do it all again. But hey, did the pair not get what made the first so much fun? I don't think so for this one takes itself so seriously it is positively boring at times. George E Carey is still effective in the main role and at the start there is some vaguely amusing stuff playing on the fact that Hollywood found it so difficult to get the whole hippie sub culture onto film effectively. But it soon drags with the wife a junkie surrounded by wooden actors and overlong sequences of cannabis smoking and bike racing. Candy is here played by Susan Romen and is fine but so coy, indeed the whole film is much less candies than the earlier one. Another sign, maybe, that this was to be a 'serious' film.

I watched WEEKEND WITH THE BABYSITTER as part of BCI Eclipse' Drive-in Cult Classics (featuring Crown International Pictures releases) on DVD.I liked this film as much as I did "The Babysitter." This movie packs a lot of story into a very short time. You have new-age bikers, lesbians, sexual impropriety, drug smuggling, addiction; and high-seas adventure, all in one spot! George E. Carey wrote, produced and starred in this movie; and, I found the plot to be believable and interesting. Some may feel the movie was overly complex; but, hey, life happens even to big Hollywood movie-men.Some of the drug-use and characterizations were a bit cliché. However, I can forgive that, knowing the film was made almost 40 years ago! The supporting cast did an outstanding job, making the premise that much more believable.The musical score is absolutely spot-on, for the times, the tempo, and for moving the story forward. I particularly enjoyed the back-and-forth cuts during the two love scenes (on on the boat; and, one at the mountain retreat).Like the Baby sitter, the movie hinges on the idea of a wayward husband brought to redemption. In this "episode" he is truly a hero, after his wife suffers her own ill-fate from years of drug abuse. He receives a lot of help, from the babysitter and her pals; and, emerges a better man.

This is another 1970's "sex-with-the-babysitter" movies (the best of these probably being "Jailbait Babysiiter" made a few years later). They don't make these kind of movies today, and personally I wouldn't want to see them if they did (after you reach a certain age you may still harbor a nostalgic attraction for the teenage girls of your own youth, but that doesn't mean that you really want to see modern-day teens having sex with anybody). That's not to say that this movie is all that racy. There's some nudity, and some gratuitous showering and spanking. The character is underage, but I don't think the unknown actress actually was.The real problem with this movie is how shamelessly it pandered to the perverts of the day. The male protagonist is very middle-aged, bordering on elderly--a lot more likely to have grand-kids than kids, and hardly any teenage girl's dream date. He even gets to be a hero when he rescues his unfaithful wife from the clutches of a vicious drug dealer, thus morally glossing over the whole infidelity and statutory rape issue. I liked "Jailbait Babysitter" better because it was told from the perspective of the girl and the middle-age lech in that one is treated to a heart attack(!) rather than to hero status. Neither is very realistic, of course, but even blatant moral hypocrisy is preferable to this kind of sleazy pandering.Two things are of interest about this otherwise forgettable movie though. It was directed by Tom McLoughlin, old "Billy Jack" himself, a guy who(perhaps erroneously)was considered in touch with the "youth culture" of the day (making it all the more curious why this movie is told from the perspective of the middle-aged codger). And the gangster's sleazy girlfriend is played by Anik Borel, an interesting European actress who appeared in the ludicrous trash-cult favorite "Werewolf Woman" because the director thought she had a face like a wolf (albeit with a body to die for). There's absolutely nothing else to recommend this though. See "Jailbait Babysitter" instead.

I rented this movie not expecting much of anything, but I was completely wrong. This movie has everything a good, campy movie from the 70's should have: drugs, sex, more drugs, and a couple of lesbians to boot. If you just want a film to pass the time, this is a pretty good one.