For Keeps? (1988)

I sensed a very present nervousness with the comedy For Keeps?, a comedy about two high school kids who finds herself pregnant by her boyfriend.  Of course, this is the fodder for a dozen or so After School Specials but at least those film took the subject seriously, if not always realistically.  For Keeps? takes the very topical issue of teen pregnancy and boxes it into the framework of a dopey sitcom.  This is a serious issue that the filmmakers are apparently too shy to really deal with.

Molly Ringwald, an actress who has taken the hack-strung model of teenaged girls – who have previously been leered in sex comedies at when they weren’t being hacked to bits in slasher movies – to a level of reality in the films by John Hughes like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.  But she does herself no favors here playing a whiny Darcy, a popular high school senior who is in love with her steady boyfriend Stan (Randall Batinkoff) who gets her pregnant just as they are making plans to go to college. What follows is the usual panic and lecturing from the parents and discussions about how their future has been completely decimated.  But it’s all wrapped up in a cutesy poo little package containing broad comedy and tender moments

For Keeps? might have been the logical extension of those John Hughes movies, but writer Denise DeClue (who wrote the wonderful About Last Night) and Tim Kazurinsky (so funny on Saturday Night Live) keep the material two feet off the ground.  The movie never really deals with the serious ramifications of two kids.  Having a baby and getting married would be much more of a struggle than this movie lets on.