If Halloween, Kill Bill and Mean Girls all had a baby together, it would probably be The Babysitter (2017). This film has the punch of Tarentino, the other-worldly gore of Carpenter and the sheer bitchy wit of Tina Fey. And I am here for every single second of it.

The Babysitter knows exactly what it is – it never attempts to stray from the path and become something that it so clearly is not. This movie is utter stupidity wrapped into a hyper-stylised, candy-coated aesthetic. It is a series of juvenile punchlines, timely comedic cuts and intermittent bursts of blood and guts. To summarise: this movie is so much and yet so little. Director McG managed to transform an incredibly simple, familiar plot (satanic worship and sacrifice are hardly new to the world of cinema) into a hilarious, Scream-esque parody of itself and its own genre.

Setting a film about devil worship, blood sacrifice and reckless murder within a teenager’s universe will never cease to be genius. It opens up the opportunity to insert levity and humour into an otherwise incredibly dark topic. The naivety and outright dimness of the young characters perfectly epitomises/reflects the stupid decisions that all teenagers eventually make during their adolescence. But this film hyperbolises that to the extreme. Where one teenager’s silly mistake may be getting caught smoking a joint in the school bathroom, these teenagers become involved with good old Beelzebub himself, selling their soul to the one person that truly grants no returns or refunds. We’ve all been through detentions and groundings, but not all of us have had to face an eternity of damnation in hell.

This film exaggerates every single element – the colour palette is bright and loud (makes you feel almost manic or drugged at certain points); the scene cuts are abrupt and unexpected; the camera angles are unstable and dynamic; freeze frames, deafening rock music and Tarantino-esque text inserts/captions constantly confuse the distinction between the film’s diegesis (aka the fictional film’s reality) and the audience’s world, thus almost breaking the fourth wall.

And finally, every character is an absolute archetype. The Babysitter does not shy away from stereotypes, in fact, it bathes and stews in them, eliciting every last ounce of comedy out of them. You have the cowardly middle schooler stuck in a limbo between childhood and adulthood, you have the cooler-than-thou, badass babysitter whom the middle-schooler idolises, you have the jock that literally never puts on a shirt, you have the vapid, vain cheerleader, the sassy black man. You have it all. Every joke ends at just the right time – the pace never slows and no joke is drawn out too long to become dull or offensive. Before you know it, you are onto the next ridiculous, bloody scene.

Did I learn anything new from this film? No. Did I feel as if I were witnessing cinematic gold? Not really. Was I thoroughly engaged throughout its entirety? Hell yes. This film doesn’t pretend to be a terrifying horror or a clever, sophisticated comedy. It serves its exact function and that is to just be a goofy, unrealistic, gratuitously violent satire of all the quintessential high-school and slasher films out there. It is the happy love-child of two extremely different genres. You’ll want to laugh and throw up at the same time. And it feels great.