Today we'll be examining the brazenly tawdry late-80s time capsule known as The Lost Boys. Before the Twilight movies forever ruined the vampire genre Joel Schumacher gave us teenage vampire garbage we could really sink our teeth into. Teeth, get it?? Cuz vampires like to bite people? With their teeth?
Buckle up and set the DeLorean for 1987, the heyday of such screen legends as Corey Haim, Corey Feldman (what's with all the Coreys??), Jason Patric, Jami Gertz, and the one teen heartthrob from this era whose career escaped more or less unscathed, Kiefer Sutherland.
Originally The Lost Boys was to be a Peter Pan-inspired film about pre-adolescent vampires, stemming from the idea that Peter could fly and never grew old (Kiefer's character was originally called Peter, while the protagonist brothers were Michael and John, later to be Michael and Sam). However when Schumacher came on board he decided teenage characters would be much more marketable/sexier.
The resulting film is delightfully "late-80s," from the costumes, to the heavy metal-influenced fashion sense of the teenage characters, to the awesomely dated soundtrack, to the southern California setting. It's a quintessential 80s summer movie. And it's fantastically dumb.
The Awesome
The Cast
This movie's got a pretty great cast, all perfectly suited to their roles. Corey Haim, while never ascending to the heights of great acting, was exactly right for the main character of Sam. Sam is the audience's guide through the story, usually in way over his head and scared shitless the whole time. Jason Patric as his older brother Michael is the character with the real arc (he goes from brooding, sullen prettyboy to brooding, sullen vampire), and he's the one whose relationship with the villains sets things in motion. Dianne Wiest is excellent as always, as their mother Lucy. Corey Feldman, whose childhood work was actually pretty underrated, is hilarious as the aspiring vampire killer Edgar Frog.
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Corey, Corey, and that other guy. |
And of course the showstopper is Kiefer Sutherland as David, the leader of the vampire gang. Sutherland was fresh off his breakout performance as teenage deliquent Ace Merrill in Stand By Me, and his performance here is similar, but with the volume turned way up. In The Lost Boys he's a total badass motherfucker who repeatedly toys with the protagonists and kills rival gang members without remorse. Great villain.