Better Watch Out (2016)

directed by Chris Peckover
USA/Australia
89 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I got off to a bad start with my semi-annual Christmas horror marathon by somehow accidentally watching a pro-life movie, so I was hoping that Better Watch Out would set me back on track. Fortunately it did, and then some, and now I feel like all the other movies I watch after it will fail to stack up. I advise anybody reading this not to read any further, because this one really depends on you not knowing anything about it. It's a home invasion movie, that's all you need to know. Go no further if you haven't seen it already.

Anyway. One thing I particularly liked about this is that, in contrast to the trope where a much younger boy tries hard to woo his hot older babysitter, the inherent creepiness of older teenagers playing along when actual children have the hots for them is highlighted. I've quit movies halfway because this mentality or "joke" or whatever people think it is is taken too far- see The Babysitter. It's just gross, not cute or funny. There's a bit of "I-got-a-crush-on-you"-type banter in Better Watch Out, but it's just banter, it's not like the movie itself goes along with it like nothing is wrong.

I actually really liked all the banter in this, to the point where I was sad when the parents left the picture and things turned more serious. When the film switches over to home invasion mode, everything falls into a sequence of events that, while taking cues in large part from older movies within the home invasion subgenre, never felt predictable. What I felt when the characters were trying hard to evade a perceived intruder in the house wasn't the type of fear that gets me personally afraid at home, but I believed that the characters were afraid themselves. I got invested in seeing these people survive, rather than waiting for the bad guy to jump out at them. It's not like one of those overdone slashers where you know what's going to happen before it happens.

This film is so well done, in fact, that when it goes in a completely different direction and pulls an entirely new plot out of left field, I didn't feel betrayed, although I had become engaged in the home invasion story. The thing that came after that felt like a solid continuation of the same movie rather than a venture into entirely new territory. Most of this hinges on the actors being really believable in any situation, which they were- actually they're all so good that even though I could tell the majority of the cast were Australians faking generic American accents, it didn't stop them from being really good at their roles. This is a good movie if you like Christmas and it's a good movie if you hate Christmas, or even if you don't celebrate it.