Don’t f**k with the babysitter…’
Ahh the 80s. Cinema’s golden age. It was a time of mullets. It was a time of hair metal. Mostly, it was a time when a sweet little girl could call Vincent D’Onofrio a ‘homo’ with impunity. A time when even a PG-13 movie about babysitting would feature the lead actress being repeatedly mistaken for a Playboy centrefold despite her character only being 17-years-old. Now we’ve got the cultural differences out of the way, let us continue…
Chris (Elizabeth Shue) is a simple girl. All she wants is to dance around in her bedroom, go on a date with Mike (Bradley Whitford) and most of all to not have to be forced to inexplicably improvise a jazz number in order to escape a vicious crime lord whilst simultaneously looking after three children. Alas, Chris just can’t catch a break.
Perhaps the greatest and most important strength of Adventures in Babysitting is that the child actors aren’t annoying, and they genuinely seem to get on with Shue (who, to be fair, is excellent throughout). Combine this with Chris Columbus behind the camera, perhaps the most important 80s director there is behind only Spielberg and John Hughes, and you are left with a film that still holds up a lot better than some of its peers.
This being an 80s movie, it would be remiss not to feature a number of insane sequences that are fairly brimming over with cocaine fuelled script meetings, the aforementioned jazz scene being one, the trucker who has a hook for a hand being another, and the film also features a pleasingly weird soundtrack – lots of jazz, a sprinkling of motown and just the intro to the Rolling Stones’ masterpiece Gimme Shelter.
You don’t watch a film from 1987 called Adventures in Babysitting to be moved or awed, you watch it to try and recapture that feeling that other films from that era have supplied over the years. And by that measure, Chris Columbus’s debut feature must go down as a resounding success.