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What do you get when you cross two musclebound knuckleheads with a wardrobe straight out of 1984 and stir in a little George Lazenby for good measure? One of the finest cinematic achievements of our generation, that's what! My only regret is that they didn't make movies like this when I was a kid. Instead I had to settle with Adventures in baby sitting, Summer School and The Three Amigos.
It starts off in typical 1980's fashion (strange seeing it was released in 1994) with a guy dumping toxic waste in a sewer drain. Then the plot unfolds. Stromm (George Lazenby) is an evil guy who likes to dump toxic waste into the sewer and Frank Hillhurst (Jared Martin) is a semi-evil guy who's trucks are responsible for transporting the toxic waste. Frank Hillhurst wants out of their deal but Stromm doesn't want to let him go so easy.
 Then we cut to an Italian restaurant with a name like Villa Calamari but it's impossible to tell since the Barbarian Brothers are saying it with their best attempts at Italian accents. Hilarity soon follows as the brothers continually return to the same table at different times confusing the patrons. When both brothers arrive at the table at the same time the guests are speechless. They can't believe their eyes! There's two people, but they look exactly the same! These people (clearly in their fifties) have never seen or heard of identical twins. I can recall there being over three sets of identical twins in my high school and indeed every time anyone saw them in the halls together it would be followed by sixty or so people doing comic double takes and another 30 people spitting their drinks out.
Soon the madcap mayhem and zany hijinks start up as the Barbarian Brothers disappoint the chef and he begins chasing them around the restaurant with an axe. A brilliant fight seen takes place and then we are left assuming that the "Beef Boys" have been fired.
 Fueled by their parents' suggestion that they open their own restaurant they decide to go to the bank to take out a loan. When the load agent decides that he's not going to grant them a loan they decide to pry open his mouth and force feed him pasta. Surprisingly this does not change his mind.
Distraught the Brothers Barbarian go to a playground to sulk. Coincidentally Frank Hillhurst is in the park making arrangements with an FBI agent to reveal all the dirty little secrets about Stromm's Toxic Waste Disposal Empire. Stromm is wise to this so he sends assassins to take care of Hillhurst. What Stromm didn't know was that the two most bodacious body building heroes in the whole wide world would be sulking in that very same park!
Impressed with their performance, Hillhurst gives the boys an invitation to baby sit his two nephews while he meets with the FBI, CIA, EPA, ATF, and DEA (this is presented in such a way that you know it's supposed to be funny but you don't know why). So for $35,000 they are going to watch these two boys and protect them because Frank Hillhurst doesn't feel comfortable leaving them with the twenty machine gun toting guards offered to him by the FBI.
Hillhurst introduces the Overgrown Chowderheads to his nephews and come to find out... they're twins too! The Barbarians can't believe it and the nephews can't believe it either! You would think that if there were any four people in this movie that could comprehend the existence of another set of twins it would be these four but apparently that isn't the case. Both sets of twins just stand there, flabbergasted by this whole situation. ** Chefelf Fast Fact: 1/250 births result in identical twins.
 The younger twins decide to have fun with the Barbarian Brothers by playing practical jokes. These jokes include pretending to hang themselves, pretending to drown in the pool, supergluing the Barbarians' butts to chair and trying to kill the Barbarians by throwing an electric heater into the pool while they're swimming. You know, all the standard murderous childhood pranks. Then one of the Barbarian Brothers walks around a corner and bumps into the butler, dropping his tray of tea cups on the floor.
The Barbarians are determined to get the boys to like them. They are finally able to turn the brothers on each other and initiate a violent fist fight. As the two boys roll around on the ground punching each other in the face the Barbarians walk away with giant smiles on their face like proud parents who's children had just made the honor roll. Then one of the Barbarian Brothers opens a door and knocks a tray of tea cups out of the butler's hands, breaking them on the floor.
 The Barbarians also attend class with the boys as they receive rudimentary grammar lessons from their personal tutor. The Barbarians get into a huge brawl in the middle of class to see who gets to date the teacher. She settles the fight by promising to date them both at the same time. The Barbarians love that idea and all fighting stops. The teacher later reads to them from The Old Man and the Sea rather poorly. I've never imagined anyone over the age of 4 1/2 to have any trouble reading from Ernest "No Sentence Should be More than Eight Words Long" Hemingway. Click here to listen to her fumble through the complex verbiage of Ernest Hemingway. Then one of the Barbarian Brothers knocks over the butler, spilling tea cups all over the floor.
 Eventually the Barbarians and the brothers become best friends and an emotional musical number takes place. This of course involves the Barbarians making the brothers' wardrobe "cooler" by doing things like: shooting at shirts hanging from clotheslines, spray painting pants, and ripping the arms off of jackets. By the end of the musical montage we are left with TWO sets of radical dudes! Then the Barbarian Brothers both back up into the butler, knocking him and his tea cups all over the floor.
Unfortunately this Utopian setting is soon overturned as the house is broken into by bad guys. Even though they hold off the bad guys for a while with their Home Alone style tactics including setting a guy's butt on fire (accompanied by a "What's cooking? Oh it's me!" reaction) and stabbing another guy in the foot with a fork, the boys are eventually kidnapped and brought to a ship at a dock because it would be boring to have a final fight scene on land. One of the Barbarian Brothers shoulders the butler to the floor spilling him and his tea cups.
 The Barbarian Brothers quickly figure out that the butler was behind the kids' kidnapping. They decide to put his head in a copy machine and Xerox the truth out of him. Amazingly he survives the classic "face being Xeroxed" torture and doesn't give them the answer they want so they decide to tie his hands to two posts and tie his legs to the back of their "Muscle Truck." This proves more effective and he reveals their location. Surprisingly they don't knock any of his tea cups over.
In a thrilling finale the Barbarian Brothers battle the bad guys with two other sets of twins that weren't previously introduced in the movie. One pair is a wild kung-fu duo and another is a set of very happy black gentlemen who very politely take turns beating the stuffing out of guys. In the end it is the Barbarians versus Stromm who, surprise, has kidnapped Judy, the boys' teacher. Stromm is quickly and easily dispatched by a sniper and the whole group then leaps from the ship which had been wired to explode at 12:00. Why? Why not?
The final scene takes place in the Barbarian Brothers' brand new restaurant where everyone that works there is evidently required to have a twin. Also it seems that everyone who eats there is required to have a twin. The whole gang has a great time eating the delicious food of the Barbarian Brothers and enjoying the ridiculous costumes of the Barbarian Brothers.
Do you smell a sequel? Sure it was over seven years ago that this movie was released but it could happen. I demand an amusing restaurant sequel to Twin Sitters. Click here to sign my demand a sequel to Twin Sitters Petition.
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"You're never home alone when you're a twin!" It was true in 1994 when they wrote it and it's true today. If you can get past the terrible picture on the front (where the Barbarian Brothers are resting their hands on the heads of the kids yet the kids are clearly lifted off the ground by the backs of their coats) you will notice some great copy on the back cover. For unknown reasons the back of the tape refers to the Barbarian Brothers as the "Beef Boys." Then it instructs you to "hang on to your dumb bells" and get ready for some real "twinsanity" with twice the action and twice the fun. Also if mentions a "double dose" of comedic adventure. Somehow they managed to avoid the use of the word "twinsufferable."
Golan-less
Something worthy of mentioning is that when the movie first starts up there is a line of credit that says" "A Globus Production." I was a little worried because I've seen a lot of movies and I've never seen Golan bow out. It's a sign of trouble when Golan won't go halfsies on a movie with Globus. Half of the movies ever made are a "Golan-Globus" production. If our man Golan didn't want to have anything to do with this film there must have been some sort of reason.
Lolita
One of the characters that lives in the luxurious Hillhurst Estate is the lusty maid Lolita. Lolita is having an affair with the gardner but is hopelessly turned on by the grotesque muscular disformities of the Barbarian Brothers. Who can blame her?
Penny
The resident cook is the jive talking, sassy Penny. Not since the 1930's has a movie featured such a stereotypical comic black woman. Twin Sitters succeeds in setting back the civil rights movement by twenty years.
The Muscle Truck
One classic scene is when the Barbarian Brothers have befriended the youngsters and want to take them out of the Estate to the Carnival. There are FBI agents positioned around the house and they won't allow the Barbarians to leave. The Barbarians decide to play a funny joke and run over the two FBI cars successfully destroying tens of thousands of dollars worth of FBI property and taking the children out into harm's way!
Link to Jacque's Article
The is the area where I link to an article that Jacques will undoubtedly write about George Lazenby seeing that he's constantly talking about him
The Soundtrack
The soundtrack is by Paul Sabu. He sounds like a cross between the poor man's Sammy Hagar and the really poor man's David Coverdale. There isn't that much information about the man on the internet. I looked for any downloadable audio by him and didn't meet up with much luck. Fortunately for me I have a huge amount of digital audio equipment and software lying around and I was quickly able to Encode an MP3 of the closing credit music. I have enclosed the file here for your enjoyment.
Bad Bad Babysitters
File Size: 1.6 MB
If you have a slow internet connection then you'll just have to trust me... this song is delicious! It has all the classic cliches of an 80's pop/metal song along with the rapping outro done by the Barbarian Brothers. If you liked their nasty rhymes on the Think Big soundtrack then you'll love this. They actually sound like they really practiced their rapping a lot between the two films. I'm not kidding, they got a lot better!
The Baby Sitters
The title of this film was changed at the last minute from The Baby Sitters to Twin Sitters. They do a very poor job of hiding this seeing that the title music calls them "The Baby Sitters" and a title logo that says "The Baby Sitters" scrolls up during the credits. For some reason all non-American releases kept the original title. Perhaps America felt that the term "Baby Sitters" was a little too racy for American audiences. Either that or it was assumed that American audiences might not get that there were a lot of sets of twins in the movie.
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