Stream It Or Skip It?

Night of the Reaper (now streaming on Shudder) finds director Brandon Christensen (whose previous release, The Puppetman, is also Shudder exclusive) toying with a few different scary subgenres: thrillers, slashers and haunted-house movies. Somewhere in that trifecta is also Babysitter Horror, where this one fits neatly, with all the usual tropes ranging from Alone In A Strange House At Night to BONK What’s That Noise to The Killer Is In The House With You. Christensen tweaks the formula a bit by incorporating a “scavenger hunt” into the plot as a serial murderer leaves clues that a cop wild-goose-chases all over town. It’s an assured effort that works pretty darn well – until it really doesn’t. 

The Gist: COLD OPEN: The babysitter puts the kids to bed, dances to Pat Benatar on MTV, cracks open a Coca-Cola Classic and fires up a cig. Obviously, she exists somewhere in the 1983-87 corridor. This was an era when movie characters like her in similar situations would be stalked and slaughtered by a maniac with an ax or butcher knife or chainsaw after they mercilessly f—ed with her for a while. And so it goes, first with the garage door opening by itself, then the emergence of a teddy bear holding a sign reading YOUR PRETTY (sic), then weird noises coming from a closet. Suddenly a figure in a cloak and skull mask appears behind her and we SLAM BANG to the title card, backed by a heaping, shiny pile of synths. Don’t tell mom what now? That the babysitter’s dead, baby.

Time passes. It’s Halloween season. Deena (Jessica Clement) is a college student, back in town for a visit. She strolls past all the skeletons and reapers and pumpkins in the yards, to the pharmacy, where she picks up a prescription for her father, then goes home. Her mom looks sad and her dad – well, he just stares straight ahead like he’s not all there. She visits her bestie Haddie (Savannah Miller), who quickly establishes her rampant horniness. Haddie has a regular babysitting gig, watching Sheriff Rod’s (Ryan Robbins) little boy Max (Max Christensen); she pictures herself seducing and marrying Sheriff Rod and being in bliss. But bliss eludes her that night – she gets a bad case of the exploding diarrheas and begs Deena to sub for her. She agrees. 

Meanwhile, Sheriff Rod walks out his front door and finds an unlabeled box on his stoop. There’s a VHS tape inside reading “Night of the Reaper – The Camper.” He pops in the tape. It’s a snuff film. And the guy who dies in it? The cops chalked it up as an accidental death a couple years ago. Curious. Then he gets another box with a garage door opener in it. He follows a hunch to the home where the aforementioned babysitter was killed, and wouldn’t you know, the door opens. Also wouldn’t you know, there’s another box with another videocassette in it. And so on. Back at Sheriff Rod’s house, Deena plays hide-and-seek with the little kid and he’s cute and they’re cute hanging out together and he shares how he’s sad that his mom died (in an accident, but can we be so sure?) and he goes to bed and she starts seeing a person-shaped shape out in the yard and hearing things inside the house. Bumps, clunks, bonks, smash-tinkle-tinkles, things of that nature. Thus begins a long stretch of movie with slow… walks… through… the house… but what Deena finds is not necessarily what you might expect.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Classic babysitter horror: Halloween, When a Stranger Calls, The House of the Devil.  

Performance Worth Watching: Clement carries herself confidently with low-key Thomasin McKenzie vibes, and manages to hold our attention for a significant stretch of this movie. 

Memorable Dialogue: “We’re being led on a scavenger hunt!” declares Sheriff Rod with a bit of unintentionally funny flair.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Christensen is a confident director, ably assembling a thriller of modest ambitions with strong visual storytelling. He effectively creates a chilly late-October smalltown atmosphere, and has a strong eye for period detail (check that Atari console) and locations, especially Sheriff Rod’s house, which exists in a sliver of uncertainty between beautiful vintage craftsman home and creepy old creaker. He casts a highly confident lead in Clement, whose wide, expressive eyes lure us in and keep us there. There are moments when the slow… walks… get laborious and repetitive, but we’re nevertheless keyed on the dramatic tension, and curious to know how the scene will play out.

And then Christensen drops a humdinger of a twist that makes you rethink everything you saw before in a manner that doesn’t just stretch credibility, it obliterates it like sledgehammer to porcelain teapot. Brain pretzel city. Further twists test whatever’s left of our suspension of disbelief, which isn’t much. Everything crumbles beneath the weight of one tiny pinhead-sized bit of logic. It doesn’t hold water. No addimum up-o. Any themes or subtext about how we must soldier on after tragedy (it brushes up against similar ideas about isolation and grief in a small town that new masterpiece Weapons touched on) falls to the wayside as we parse over the hows and whens and wheres of minute details pertaining to cups of coffee and whether or not that butcher knife hit a major artery. There’s one big, gooey, satisfying practical-FX kill that’ll find you groping for the rewind button to watch it again, but it’s not nearly enough to compensate for the tryhard screenplay. For more than an hour, Night of the Reaper is very good for what it is, a nothingbudget Shudder original with a pretty low ceiling, but it stumbles over its own attempt to defy expectations, and faceplants at the worst possible time.

Our Call: Night of the Reaper’s stripped-down simplicity was its strength, but it wraps with a final act that’s so convoluted, it nukes itself. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.