"Bad Behavior" was both written and directed by Nicholas Brandt and Lisa Hamil (real-life couple?) and starred Hallee Hirsh as Zoë, a babysitter who shows up for what she thinks is going to be a routine overnight job while the couple whose three kids she'll be babysitting go out of town for a family member's wedding. Only the three kids turn out to be proverbially from hell: older brother Tyler (Austin Rogers, who bears an odd resemblance to a very young Tom Hayden) keeps making sexual advances towards Our Heroine; middle brother Jack (Jeremy Dozier) is a sort of idiot savant whose parents think he's getting into Yale; and the youngest child and only girl, Grace (Elsie Fisher), is obsessed with princesses and wants to wear her princess dress to daddy's dinner date. The parents duly leave and Zoë invites her boyfriend Kansas (Andrew James Allan, who's considerably shorter than Mike Nesmith of the Monkees but otherwise strikingly resembles him) over, hoping to make out with him (or more!) once the children sleep — only Kansas's presence sends the paranoid Jack off the deep end; he immediately concludes that Kansas and Zoë are "spies" sent on some sort of secret mission to destroy him and his family. Jack takes over the rest of the house and forces Zoë, Tyler and Grace to hide in an upstairs bathroom (which has a gable in its ceiling from which Jack, when he chooses to, can spy on them from the roof of the house).
The movie then turns into a bizarre combination of "The Old Dark House" and "The Panic Room," as Tyler keeps dropping hints of what Jack did during his previous bouts with less-than-sanity, including setting fire to the place, slicing Tyler's ear off (fortunately the ear was recovered in time that it could be re-attached surgically) and possibly killing the previous babysitters. But like its two predecessors on Lifetime's Saturday schedule, "Bad Behavior" has an outrageous reversal in the final act. "Bad Behavior" has a few nice touches — notably some establishing shots of the exterior of the house where it takes place, in which Brandt and Hamil pull the neat trick of making a pretty ordinary suburban ranch house (except for those two gables on the roof) look sinister and almost Gothic — but for the most part it treads so much on the thin edge of silliness, and all too often goes over, one wonders if Brandt and Hamil were doing a serious Lifetime movie or a parody of one. I'm really tired of the penchant of modern-day thriller writers for ridiculously unbelievable reversals, especially at the ending — when O. Henry pulled this sort of thing he was at least able to make the finale seem like it had some relationship to the course of his story before that, but writers like Nicholas Brandt, Lisa Hamil and Brian McAuley simply don't have that sort of knack.
The movie then turns into a bizarre combination of "The Old Dark House" and "The Panic Room," as Tyler keeps dropping hints of what Jack did during his previous bouts with less-than-sanity, including setting fire to the place, slicing Tyler's ear off (fortunately the ear was recovered in time that it could be re-attached surgically) and possibly killing the previous babysitters. But like its two predecessors on Lifetime's Saturday schedule, "Bad Behavior" has an outrageous reversal in the final act. "Bad Behavior" has a few nice touches — notably some establishing shots of the exterior of the house where it takes place, in which Brandt and Hamil pull the neat trick of making a pretty ordinary suburban ranch house (except for those two gables on the roof) look sinister and almost Gothic — but for the most part it treads so much on the thin edge of silliness, and all too often goes over, one wonders if Brandt and Hamil were doing a serious Lifetime movie or a parody of one. I'm really tired of the penchant of modern-day thriller writers for ridiculously unbelievable reversals, especially at the ending — when O. Henry pulled this sort of thing he was at least able to make the finale seem like it had some relationship to the course of his story before that, but writers like Nicholas Brandt, Lisa Hamil and Brian McAuley simply don't have that sort of knack.