User Reviews

"Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear" was shown on BBC1 last week without "Baby Monitor" in the title, in a bid to make it sound less silly. The attempt succeeded with the title, but that still leaves the movie itself.

A remake of the German TV movie "Babyfon" (!), it's the heartwarming story of a beautiful nanny (Josie Bissett), the employer she loves and who loves her (Jason Beghe), the son she dotes on, and the wife (Barbara Tyson) who won't be running for the president of her fan club; the stage isn't set for a riveting thriller, less due to the cast (which isn't all that good for the most part, especially the boy playing the whiny little brat our heroine takes care of - quite frankly, I was rooting for him to be rubbed out) than do adaptor-director Walter Klenhard. I've complained about his work before with "Rush of Fear" (there's that word again), and while this isn't quite as awful, it does rank just as high on the idiocy scale.

While in the right hands the scenario of an innocent woman at the mercy of psychos with neither knowing where the other is can be (and has been) done effectively, here Klenhard's sloppy directing and slack writing wipe out any suspense and rack up the unsubtle hints ("You could scream for days and nobody could hear you") while the implausibilities steadily get in the way of any effectiveness - one of the few decent moments comes when Josie is trying to get out of the locked-up condo where most of the action takes place and finds she's trying to force the gate open with the plank the villains used to beat her friend to death, but then you're wondering why they dragged her corpse out of her apartment in the first place. And why she's never mentioned again afterwards (even in the denouement). And why nobody seems to be in that building but them. And marvelling at the way setups are so blatantly contrived throughout (watch for those blankets).

If nothing else, "Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear" does deserve credit for getting so absurd that the jaw-dropping final act actually sends the movie into so-bad-it's-good territory. And it is still better, as stated earlier, than the same director's "Rush of Fear" - which I sincerely hope BBC1 doesn't show in the same slot that this TV movie was in; it would hurt us Rosanna Arquette fans a lot if it was scheduled after little sister Patricia in "Medium" as well...

No really, that's the title, and humor me here but, why can't we have more absurd titles like this one for our films? The upcoming SALT ripoff, excuse me, SALT inspired, film "Hanna" may be better suited ditching it's dull moniker and adopting a title like "I Was a Teenage Contract Killer" or "Not So Sweet Sixteen", just a thought. At any rate, with Baby Monitor Sound Of Fear, at last Hollywood has made a film for the untapped adulterer market, as the hero is a married man and father of one, who is having an affair with the film's heroine, his babysitter! Except for the abandonment of trust and mockery of marriage vows, the two are really swell people. The same can't be said for the man's wife, a mentally disturbed woman who hasn't let her condition get in the way of achieving a successful career managing her own business. Guess who the villain is in this scenario. The psychotic spouse catches wind of the affair and hires a pair of killers to off the babysitter/mistress while she's babysitting her son, hows that for a safety minded mother. Of course if the uncaring mom finds the kid as obnoxious as the audience then her decision is no surprise. So as a result, the titular baby monitor figures prominently in the storyline, unfortunately the filmmakers went the serious route with this nonsense and we are left with one less entertaining exploitation film. Oh well, at least we have the title.