“Smashing? What, did he hit you over the head with his charm?”

Justin’s Rating: Wondering who would win in this match-up: The Breakfast Club vs. The Baby-Sitters Club. Or, more precisely, who Bender would beat to death with their own stylized notebooks.

Justin’s Review: When I was but a young teen myself, I spent a summer month with my cousins in Texas. The one cousin there who actually read was a female-type, which meant that the only available books on the shelves tended to be brightly colored, lightly scented, and flowing with estrogen like a mighty river. Thus, I went through a strange and quite shameful period of one week where I read about 30 books in The Baby-Sitters Club series. See, I should be a children’s book writer, because these things are so obscenely easy to slap together, spanning about 70 highly predictable pages each. I know, another Justin Fact™ that you wish I had just kept to myself. Tough noogies.

As far as I can tell, The Baby-Sitters Club movie is an exposé on a freaky cult of seemingly cherubic prepubescent girls who worm their way into neighborhood homes, eat the children, then plant space pods in their wake that give birth to insidious doppelgangers. With the amount of blood, mucus, and eyeball popping that goes on here, how they obtained a PG rating is far beyond my understanding.

While guys might like movies that, at most, star two entirely separate people, both of whom are male, girls tend to gush over these ensemble “bonding” flicks that host swarms of giggling girls, who all have at most one clearly-defined personality trait. In The Baby-Sitters Club, there’s the quiet, going-to-kill-them-all one; the hippy; the stuck-up rich snob; the “artist” who makes poo-like sculptures; the accountant; the one non-white person to demonstrate some token of racial equality; the recovering alcoholic; the profanity-spewing one; and so on. It’s like that second edition of Voltron where they had about 526 different crappy vehicles, none of which were cool on their own, but they could combine all 526 into one fairly sportin’ robot.

By the way, guess who the quiet girl is, in her feature film debut? Yes, it’s Miss All That, Rachael Leigh Cook, looking smothered to death among non-talent here! And yes, she looks kind of cute, even this young. Hey, what? Kyle doesn’t have a monopoly on saying creepy things! Well, fine. I retract that statement.

While I might not be the exact demographic that the studios were shooting for in an audience for this film, I must butt in anyway and give my opinion so that all the world will know what to expect when putting this movie of pure demonic intentions into their players. First of all, this is one of those young-young girl movies, or “Chickie Flickies” as I like to call them. Well, call them as of right now. As with most chickie flickies, it’s extremely idealized without a bone of reality in favor of the power of youth, and pretty much every adult here is a complete bonehead.

In a world like BSC, all of the girls are bestest of friends, smarter than three foxes tied together, wiser than Aristotle, and boasting a full-fledged makeup department to cover up any blemishes. In this world, bad girls are always the ones sneering, unlimited funds back up any project (like running a day camp with thousands of dollars worth of equipment), and boys exist solely to be lusted and drooled after. If you think guys have out-of-control hormones, you just haven’t met the Baby-Sitters Club yet. By the end of this film, at least two of the girls were pregnant just through the intense leering they gave the pansy boys.

It’s girly, it’s light and inoffensive, as long as you’re not expecting anything surprising or original out of this. In any case, all of the original BSC are now in their 50’s and working the late shift at Wal-Mart as greeters, so it’s a moot point whether their club worked or not, eh?