Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

Adventures in Babysitting

I am introducing a new category here on my blog. It is called “My wife wants me to see this”. As I am progressing up through the eighties, my wife supplies me with a lot of ideas for movies to watch. So many in fact that she has now earned her own category. It is still me who watch and review the movie, but they are her picks.

The first entry on that list is “Adventures in Babysitting”.

Chris Parker (Elisabeth Shue) is a 17 year old high school student who earns a bit of money doing babysitting. When her boyfriend cancels on her, she instead accepts a job sitting for Brad (Keith Coogan) and Sara (Maia Brewton). Brad is 15 years old and has a crush on Chris. His friend Daryl (Anthony Rapp), who joins the party, finds there is a striking similarity between Chris and Playboy’s March centrefold. Sara is much younger and a daredevil who idolizes Thor (god or superhero).

The evening quickly takes a left turn when Chris’ friend, Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), calls in panic from a bus station downtown Chicago. She has run away from home but regrets and wants Chris to pick her up. With the children in tow, Chris drives from the suburbs into town. This turns out to be quite an odyssey.

Through a number of strange coincidences, a puncture turning into being caught in a shooting, then in a car theft, to being prisoners of a local gang who steals muscle-cars and distribute them nationwide. They make a spectacular escape, but Daryl, wanting a replacement for his lost Playboy magazine, steals the gangster’s copy. This pisses them off. Not because they like the magazine but because it is filled with incriminating notes of their dealings. Now Chris must keep track of her charges, find Brenda and avoid getting caught by gangsters.

“Adventures in Babysitting” taps into a number of overlapping genres that were very popular in the eighties and early nineties. There is the “crazy things happen with the babysitter” theme as well as the “Children/teens from the suburbs encountering the menacing city” and of course the chase movie. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Uncle Buck” and “Home Alone” are all in this family of movies. They make up the quintessential eighties family movie and that is exactly where we are with “Adventures in Babysitting”. The only surprise is that John Hughes is not involved in it. And that I never watched if before my wife made me aware of it.

There is an innocence to “Adventures in Babysitting” that is very eighties (and also unmistakeably Disneyesque). With a sole exception (Sara walking on the outside of a skyscraper) it never gets truly dangerous and the bad guys have a tendency to fumble. The teenagers skirt the topic of sex, but stops short of anything actually happening. That may sound boring and once you start noticing, a little annoying, but in this eighties fantasy it gets away with it, the same way “Home Alone” got away with the horrible nightmare of a small child forgotten at home over the holidays. Sometimes the fantasy elements takes the story off on some strange tangents, such a the blues bar scene or the strange tow-truck guy, but it works because it is an adventure and through the children’s eyes everything here is an adventure anyway.

It is difficult not to be charmed by “Adventures in Babysitting”. It is not top quality and it does venture into a lot of cliché’s and completely unlikely coincidences, but it is also fun and if you, like me, love thar eighties vibe, then it is difficult to be hard on this movie. It is a good time in the sofa Sunday afternoon. And Elisabeth Shue was a big thing back then.