The Christina Applegate-led dark comedy from the 90s gets a shrewdly made update that acts as a blueprint for how Hollywood should revisit older material
Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead is the ultimate ode to the latchkey generation. To watch the 1991 film now is to be reminded of a simpler time when parents barely checked in, house parties were all the rage and Christina Applegate was the ideal girl next door. Given its place in the grand tradition of coming-of-age classics, somewhere between Tom Hanks’s Big and Jennifer Garner’s 13 Going on 30, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood mulled a remake of Applegate’s celluloid breakout. Any update would have to relate to a new generation that, in many ways, has had to grow up even faster than their predecessors.
The reboot, which comes courtesy of Paramount streamer BET+, doesn’t just understand this assignment; it nails it. The new film echoes the wit and charm of the original with a major twist: now the black comedy focuses on a Black family in Southern California. Other details from the first film are shuffled around and some supplemental characters axed. But for the most part writer Chuck Hayward is faithful to the source material written by Neil Landau and Tara Ison – both of whom receive story bylines and serve as executive producers alongside Tyra Banks. Their film, helmed by Wade Allain-Marcus in his studio directorial debut, is a model for how future reboots can be faithfully done.
