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A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting Review

A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting is coming to Netflix just in time for Halloween! This family friendly spooky movie is sure to be a hit with the kids!

a babysitters guide to monster hunting movie poster

I have to be completely honest here, the main reason I was excited about A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting is because of Tom Felton, who plays The Grand Guignol. If you don’t know who that is, I can’t be your friend anymore. But for real, he is the one and only Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films. If you don’t already know, I am a Slytherin, and I adore him (I even had a dog named Draco). 

Ok, enough about my unhealthy love for Draco and moving on to the movie — my entire family really enjoyed it! I was a little worried that A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting would be too much for a younger audience, but it wasn’t. Yes it is geared toward more of the young adult audience — tweens and teens — but we all had a blast watching together.

a babysitters guide to monster hunting

What Is This Movie About?

A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting is based off of a book, that we now own and cannot wait to read. The story is exactly what you might expect. Kelly is babysitting a child for the first time. After he talks about his nightmares coming to life, he ends up getting captured by The Grand Guignol — who wants to use him to create a nightmare army and help him take over the world. 

When Kelly calls 911, they think it is a prank. This is Halloween night after all. Lucky for her Liz shows up and explains the order of the babysitters to her. They know about monsters and do everything in their power to stop them from hurting children. The rest is a wild and crazy, but super fun, action packed adventure! 

a babysitters guide to monster hunting tom felton

Is It OK For Kids?

My girls are 7 and 9 years old and there was a moment or two that my youngest got a little bit nervous. Every so often, especially when The Grand Guignol was on the screen, she would cling to me. Which I totally get because Tom Felton looked really creepy! He also played the part really well and even had me on edge a few times. 

The monsters in this movie though are not scary at all. The scariest one to us was the Spider Queen which they only mention by name, and show a drawing from the Babysitter’s Guide. The reason my girls and I did not like her is probably because we hate spiders. 

In this movie though, there are some adorable little monsters called toadies that provide all the comic relief and honestly, are just super cute and silly. There is also a shadow monster who might be a little scary, but my daughters said he looks cute. Another monster is a cat lady monster and she didn’t seem that scary at all either. 

I would imagine most kids would be fine with this movie. There wasn’t any language that I recall, but there are some fights as the babysitters are literally hunting monsters.

a babysitters guide to monster hunting

A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting: (L-R) Tamara Smart as Kelly Ferguson, Oona Laurence as Liz Lerue. Cr. Justina Mintz/NETFLIX © 2020

Overall Thoughts

A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting is a super fun family film filled with silly monsters, action packed adventure, and even a few spooky moments! Sure there are some parts that might be scary for kids but nothing that I think is so scary you should avoid it. This is the perfect movie to watch together as a family and have a few laughs. 

I really enjoyed the way the movie is shot, and was a big fan of a lot of the creepy moments. It is very clear they are setting this film up to be a franchise, which I am totally here for. There are currently three books but the babysitter’s order talks about seven main monsters, so I imagine there will be seven books altogether — and if we are lucky, seven films!

a babysitters guide to monster hunting

A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting: (L-R) Oona Laurence as Liz Lerue, Tamara Smart as Kelly Ferguson. Cr. Justina Mintz/NETFLIX © 2020

About A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting

When high school freshman Kelly Ferguson (Tamara Smart) reluctantly agrees to babysit Jacob Zellman (Ian Ho) on Halloween, the last thing she expects is to be recruited into an international secret society of babysitters who protect kids with special powers from monsters. In order to keep Jacob safe from harm, Kelly teams with no-nonsense chapter Vice President Liz Lerue (Oona Laurence), tech genius Berna Vincent (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson), creature expert Cassie Zhen (Lynn Masako Cheng) and potions master Curtis Critter (Ty Consiglio) to defeat a Boogeyman known as “The Grand Guignol” (Tom Felton), a glamorous witch named “Peggy Drood” (Indya Moore) and their legion of mysterious monsters.

Based on the first installment of Joe Ballarini’s popular scary book series of the same name, A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is directed by Rachel Talalay, produced by Ivan Reitman and Amie Karp, with Naia Cucukov, Tom Pollock, and Ilona Herzberg executive producing. Alessio Scalzotto, Tamsen McDonough, Ashton Arbab, Crystal Balint, and Ricky He also co-star in this action-packed adventure about working together to overcome your fears.

A Babysitter’s Guide To Monster Hunting hits Netflix on October 15th!

A Babysitter's Guide To Monster Hunting Interview With The Cast

Thursday 15th of October 2020

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