58 out of 58 people found this review helpful.
80s vampire comedy with some striking visuals and some funny lines
Date of Review: Mar 14, 2009
The Bottom Line: Unless you were born in the early 1970s, essential only for completists of Joel Schumacher, Kiefer Sutherland, or Jason Patric.
The 1987 "Lost Boys" was follow-up to the successful amalgam of emerging young stars in "St. Elmo's Fire" by Joel Schumacher (on the path to driving a stake through the heart of the Batman franchise—or so it seemed in 1997). Something of a teen favorite at the time, I didn't realize that it was a comedy. Indeed, I wasn't certain that the intent was comedy until the squirt guns were loaded before the final, extended confrontation of vampires and the runty vampire-busters.
I though I'd ended my Jason Patric mini-retrospective, but my curiosity overcame me. I have to say that he looked good with a shaved chest as Michael , though his "acting" consisted primarily of looking pained but determined. I thought that Corey Haim as his younger brother was more entertaining. He was 'spozed to be puerile.
The half-pint ghostbusters (I mean VAMPIREbusters, or do I mean GOONIES?) Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander (Edgar and Alan — I've heard that pairing of names somewhere, musta been a source of Roger Corman movies...) don't rise above silly. As a Bad Dude, David, Kiefer Sutherland seemed typecast, but was occasionally funny. Jami Gertz (who also costarred with Patric in "Solarbabies") is darkly alluring (luring Michael to the Dark Side at David's behest.
Dianne Wiest played a cut-rate "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," making a poorer choice of saviors than Ellen Burstyn did as Alice. She arrives at the house of her taxidermist father (the very hammy Barnard Hughes given free rein) above Santa Cruz (called Santa Carla in the movie), which has been turned into the murder capital of the world by overpopulation of vampires.
Not having been a teenager in the late-1980s, I am outside the original demographic target or among those with nostalgia for the movie. It stimulated a few chuckles form me, but many more eye rolls. The dialogue was not as all-out campy as the tv "Batman" (for which I do have nostalgia..). The romances lacked the force of those in "Interview with a Vampire" (there is a child vampire, though, as in it). For more recent referents, "Lost Boys" is neither as gory nor as witty as "Shaun of the Dead" or "Hot Fuzz" (for me the funnier of that pair). Some visual panache may have come from Schumacher, along with the cinematography of Michael Chapman (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Primal Fear).
There is a special edition with a disc of bonus features (not including contributions from Patric, who unlike Schumacher, moved on to better work), and the movie is available in Blue-Ray.
© 2009, Stephen O. Murray
(For the more serious movies in my Jason Patric retrospective click
here.)
I checked this DVD out from the San Francisco Public Library, so this is a contribution to the
National Library Week writeoff.
