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Review

TLA Guide:
Hip vampire tale about a family moving to a small California coastal town, and discovering the city is populated with teenage vampires. Patric and Haim are the brothers battling bloodsuckers Sutherland and friends. Wiest is the boys' supermom, and Hughes is the coolest grandfather this side of Grandpa Munster. (Even if it did bring together "the Coreys," it’s still good fun.)

Danger After Dark:
A much-loved cult favorite that has grown in stature since its 1987 release (when, unlike so many other latter-day cult films, it was also quite successful initially), The Lost Boys is the slick and thoroughly ’80s teen vampire horror/comedy that stands as one of that decade's most widely recognized genre films. So here's a question: why?! Can someone please explain the enduring admiration for this thoroughly mediocre and lackluster pubescent bloodsucker opus? Am I missing something here, or does it really all just boil down to finding the film’s young male actors really hot?

Lost Boys certainly isn’t a terrible film, and it does have its strong qualities — sleek cinematography from regular Scorsese collaborator Michael Chapman (who did much more evocative genre photography a decade earlier on 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a sweet supporting performance from Dianne Wiest, some fleetingly glimpsed but nonetheless effective special makeup FX by Greg Cannom, et al — but dear God, this isn’t even among the best, say, fifty or so ’80s American horror films, let alone one of the classics. In fact, Lost Boys isn’t even the best mid-’80s teen vampire horror/comedy, a pretty limited subgenre (for the record, that would be Fright Night). Nevertheless, it does have its admirers, and I can only assume ’80s nostalgia, and a fondness for the eye candy of young and cool Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland in leather and rock star garb must have something to do with that. The story, a vampiric Peter Pan riff transplanted to a Southern California beach town, is familiar to all: Patric and kid brother Corey Haim (weirdly, the best young actor in this film) move to town with newly divorced mom Wiest, and soon the eldest brother is sucked into a gang of boardwalk bloodsuckers led by Sutherland. As an ’80s time capsule piece, Lost Boys is effective but embarrassing: the costuming is hideously dated, the one-liners and quips are now stale ("Death by stereo!"), and the music is, virtually without exception, awful (compare the score with the soundtracks to other teen pictures of the time, i.e. Fast Times at Ridgemont High or the John Hughes films). And it should be pointed out that both Sutherland and Patric are largely dreadful in their roles: the former is an uncharismatic and unconvincing villain figure, the latter sleepwalks through his role like a narcisisstic and pretentious method actor embarrassed to be in a genre film (which, according to the supplementary material on this DVD, is not far from the truth). Director Joel Schumacher brings a definite — if often inane — visual gloss to the material, and I suppose the film is a reasonably engaging weekend afternoon time-waster, but the affection displayed for such a mundane, unoriginal (and most definitely not "hip" — a term applied too frequently to this project) piece of work is confounding. One more thing, though: this is still probably the best film Schumacher ever directed. Think about that for a while.

 -- Travis Crawford