MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Guardian’: Unintentionally a Real Scream

“The Guardian,” a horror film featuring homicidal trees, will not advance the cause of Earth Day. William Friedkin’s shocker is supposed to be primally terrifying, but primally silly is more like it.

And yet you can’t just dismiss this film with a steady stream of wisecracks, as many around me were doing at the screening I attended. The shocks are too vile, too humorlessly sadistic. “The Guardian” (citywide) is inept, but even if it were better, the question remains: Do we really need a movie about a nanny who spirits babies into bloody oblivion?

The opening credits thoughtfully alert us to a thousands-of-years-old Druid ritual in which humans are sacrificed to trees. Given the stiffness of the acting in this movie, it would appear that the entire cast has been sacrificed.

Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) are dual-career yuppies who, to make ends meet in their spacious new L.A. canyon home, hire a live-in nanny, Camilla (Jenny Seagrove), for their baby boy. For a while, Camilla’s job rating is A-1. True, she has a British accent--a sure signal that something effete is afoot--and a faraway look that spells come-hither to Phil. She takes baths and leaves the door strategically ajar.

But it’s not until the couple’s yup architect (Brad Hall) sneaks a peek at Camilla’s woodland gambols that the jig is up. (His jig is up too, courtesy of some ravenous coyotes.) Phil is contacted by a distraught mother whose baby was kidnaped by a woman fitting Camilla’s ID. A check of Camilla’s resume turns up phony credentials. Confronted with the truth, Camilla unveils her powers, which, like her ability to fly, or molt, or whatever, seem to change from scene to scene--a sure sign that the filmmakers, like the parents, are in trouble.

“The Guardian” is being touted as a supernatural horror-film variation of a parent’s worst nightmare, but the baby in the movie is given surprisingly short shrift. The filmmakers have no feeling for this child; his endangerment is the film’s McGuffin, a pretext for gore. When the bereft mother of the kidnaped child tells her sad tale to Phil, we expect some kind of follow-up, some further registration of her pain. Or some relief, perhaps. But she’s a McGuffin too.

Even the film’s creepiest special effect--a twisted tree with the contorted faces of babies writhing through the bark--is exploited solely for its gore potential. Phil takes a chain saw to the tree and blood pours out.

Kate gets almost as short shrift from the filmmakers as her baby. What “The Guardian” is really about is the husband’s erotic attraction to the nanny. Camilla’s witchy powers are sexually tinged. The film, adapted from a short story by co-screenwriter Dan Greenburg, is really a male fantasy about the dreadful consequences of turning off to your wife in her motherly mode and looking astray. It’s “Fatal Attraction” with birch bark.

“The Guardian” (rated R) is clearly William Friedkin’s bid to re-enter the big time by mainlining “Exorcist”-style horror. But the horror-film landscape has changed since he made “The Exorcist.” Nowadays it’s the real-life horror movies like, yes, “Fatal Attraction” that tend to scare audiences the most. The Stephen King movie adaptations, and their imitators, are usually effective only insofar as they make fun of their own pulp horror conventions.

There’s surprisingly little (intentional) humor in “The Guardian,” and that makes it seem even more objectionable. A movie this smarmy hasn’t earned the right to its seriousness.