Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead

Five siblings are left home for the summer when their mother travels to Australia, with an elderly babysitter hired to keep them in line. The arrangement ends abruptly when the sitter dies, and the children decide not to tell their mother. They are then faced with covering household costs on their own, since the money they had is gone with the sitter.

Seventeen-year-old Sue Ellen, the eldest, takes the practical route: she invents a résumé and talks her way into a job at a fashion company, posing as an adult while her younger siblings run the house unsupervised. Her new professional life brings responsibilities she was not prepared for, and keeping the deception going proves difficult.

Stephen Herek directed the film, his third of nineteen, following Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and preceding The Mighty Ducks. Neil Landau and Tara Ison wrote the screenplay, and Christina Applegate leads a cast that includes Joanna Cassidy, John Getz, Josh Charles, Keith Coogan and Concetta Tomei, with 44 credited performers in all. Made for about 10 million dollars, it returned roughly 25 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.4 from around 41,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.2 from about 506, while the film critics' rating stands at 4.4 from 34 reviews, well below the audience scores.