'Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead' Didn't Need A Remake — With Black People

Director Stephen Herek’s 1991 cult comedy, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” is a bit of an awkward movie to talk about today.

It satisfied young audiences at the time with its story about 17-year-old Sue Ellen Crandell (Christina Applegate) whose burned-out mom dips out of town (yay!) and leaves her with her younger siblings and a babysitter (boo!). After their babysitter suddenly croaks, the kids decide to bury her — mistakenly, with the money their mother left her — and attempt to be responsible humans on their own.

That entails Sue Ellen faking professional experience and her age to land a gig coveted by any hip young woman in the early ’90s, when glossy magazines like Teen and Seventeen were all the rage: a job at a fashion brand. Hijinks ensue, obviously.

Still, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” like many teen movies of its era, is a very specific offering.

The film coasts off fun catch phrases — like the overwhelmed Sue Ellen continually telling her boss, “Right on top of that, Rose!” — and a bona fide star whose charm could help smooth over plot holes like, say, the repercussions for failure to report a dead body or false personation. It is an enjoyable fantasy.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find a glowing review upon its release. Critics panned it as “feebly written,” “incredibly dumb” and a film that “doesn’t exactly pulsate with comic originality.”

(The Macaulay Culkin-starring comedy “Home Alone” came out a year before and was an instant classic, in part because of the same, then more-novel “minor finds entertaining ways to fend for themself after their parents leave them stranded” premise.)

While these reviews often concerningly reflected the older, white and male response to young