Profoundly unfunny, unscary and unoriginal, “The Babysitter” accomplishes nothing except for wasting 90 minutes of your time.Noah Griffith is an unemployed suspended college student who lives with his divorced mother in New Jersey. That’s not to say that every movie should be breaking new ground and changing the game, but if a movie is going to use the same tired formula, they should at least do it well. It’s not doing anything that dozens of other movies haven’t done much better. “The Babysitter” probably isn’t the worst movie to come out this year, but it’s definitely among the least consequential. In a movie that tries way too hard and consistently misses the mark, it’s nice to see Weaving’s character come together so well without noticing the seams. Bee might not be a particularly scary villain, but her charisma radiates off the screen.

She plays Bee’s specific brand of effortless cool well, oscillating easily between laid back and vicious without a blink. Bee and Cole are the only ones with any semblance of a personality or a character arc, but Samara Weaving really makes Bee feel like a person in a way that Judah Lewis just doesn’t for Cole. The one saving grace of “The Babysitter” is the title character herself. It’s the same old tropes, recycled here in the least original way possible. The Black guy dies first, the cheerleader is the slut who deserves to die at the hands of brutal, gendered violence, the nerdy hero is rewarded with a girl at the end as though she’s some prize to be won. We’re treated to long, slow full-length pans of Bee’s body, an extended and completely gratuitous girl-on-girl makeout scene - and all the tired racist, sexist nonsense that pervades the horror cliches “The Babysitter” uses. The movie is filled with these awful, cringeworthy, was-that-supposed-to-be-funny moments, interspersed with scenes of explicit exploitation.

Case in point: Cole kicks the jock in the crotch, thinking this will help him triumphantly escape, but the jock jumps up seconds later and shouts, “You missed my dick Cole! And I’ve got a big dick!”

But all attempts at humor fall horribly flat, usually because of a bad sense of timing and editing, and the fact that most of the comic moments are clunkily written dick jokes. You could call it a comedy - after all it’s a light, breezy movie that certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously. Director McG (“3 Days to Kill”) decides to go for a quirky, “Home Alone” vibe in which Cole engineers increasingly wacky/decreasingly creative methods of offing the cult members (Accidental hanging by tree house! Fireworks! Spiders! Super sharp trophy!). But “The Babysitter” is decidedly not a horror movie. All the classic horror archetypes are there: the dumb sadistic jock (Robbie Amell, “ARQ”), the Black guy who, of course, dies first (played by Vine star King Bach, “Fifty Shades of Black”), the cheerleader (Bella Thorne, “You Get Me”) and the goth (Hana Mae Lee, “Pitch Perfect 2”). The rest of the film is an extended chase scene, as Cole fights off each one of Bee’s cult members.

The babysitter movie cast