Amazon.com video review:
Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead aspires to be a cross
between Home Alone and Risky Business, with Christina Applegate as
an inadvertent scam artist who gets in over her head and somehow pulls it
off. When her mother goes to Australia for two months, Sue Ellen
(Applegate) thinks she's going to be in charge--until an elderly tyrant of
a babysitter arrives. But on the very first night the old lady has a heart
attack and keels over. Sue Ellen and her siblings leave the body at a
mortuary, only to discover afterward that all the money their mother had
left for the summer was in the babysitter's clothes. So Sue Ellen has to
get a job. Thanks to a trumped-up resume, she ends up as an executive
assistant at a clothing manufacturer. For a while she keeps her head above
water by skillfully exploiting a friendly coworker, but her brothers and
sisters are running amok at home and a venomous receptionist has it in for
her at work. The role-reversal humor of Sue Ellen having to mother her
siblings is unsurprising, but Applegate is unexpectedly appealing; her
scenes with Josh Charles (Dead Poet's Society, Threesome)
have a sweet chemistry. Joanna Cassidy (Blade Runner, The
Laughing Policeman) plays Sue Ellen's boss and a young David Duchovny
(The X-Files, The Rapture) is a weaselly clerk. --Bret
Fetzer
