THE LOST BOYS (1987) Not lost enough Oh boy, Joel Schumacher. Reviewing this guy's films online must be like telling a roomful of drunken, argumentative Emerils about the last time I ate at Wendy's. Dare I praise even a single aspect? I mean, I'm certainly no fan of the guy, not by a loooong shot, but the venom directed at him has always struck me as a little on the silly side. I know he more or less killed the Batman franchise, but I think that's a GOOD thing. The Schumachers might direct a lot of crappy movies, but they aren't your real enemy, people, the Bruckheimers are. Anyway, on the more specific subject of this movie - I didn't like this movie when I was 14, and I don't like it now. Vampirism as a metaphor for peer pressure, that's what we're expected to swallow here. Expectedly, Mr. Subtlety is unable to resist a scene where all of the hero's new friends jump off of a bridge, and thus so must he. Jason Patric plays Michael, who's like an 80's teenaged version of The Fonz. He moves to a new small town with his family, including little brother Corey Haim. But there's a local biker gang of vampires who have their sights on making Michael one of their own, while Haim falls in with a (very small) crowd who not only believes in vampires, but wants to do hunt them down and destroy them. This crowd (two people) is led by Corey Feldman. Yes kids, all your Corey needs are catered to in this movie. This is one of those movies which make you wonder if the 80's were ever really THAT 80's. Take the awful synth-pop band playing on stage, led by a chain-wearing bodybuilder who plays the saxophone. (ah, the saxophone...once an instrument of music, but the 80's turned it into an instrument of torture) If 80's pop is your bag, then this soundtrack must be for you, still surprisingly remaining a consistent seller after all these years. There are two or three INXS songs here, for those of you who miss INXS. The cast has a few gems (Kiefer Sutherland does a good job for the first half of the movie, and Dianne Wiest kinda reminds me of mom), but most everybody is either hilariously miscast (Patric and romantic interest Jami Gertz look so much alike, I had to tell them apart by the stubble), trapped under an unflattering mullet (one of the vampires is Alex Winter, the incredibly LESS-talented half of Bill and Ted), or just blathering out obvious, cookie-cutter dialogue (like the "wacky" grandpa, who does something "wacky" every ten minutes or so...what, no "I'm gonna haul ass to Lollapalooza"?). This is truly one of the most clueless vampire movies I've ever seen. It's mentioned that garlic has no effect...while I do sometimes wonder why these "vampire rules" work the way they do, I'm wondering more why this movie would choose to leave the garlic while keeping every other silly thing. Usually, I'm wondering, why garlic? Now I'm wondering, why NOT garlic? There is no answer to be found. But that's not where it gets really clueless yet. Take one scene where a vampire falls into a bathtub filled with holy water and garlic cloves. This results in a horrible, screaming, boiled-in-acid-type death for the vampire, causing all the pipes in the house to burst, Highlander-style. How'd that happen? The tub was stoppered up! Vampires also cause TV's and VCR's to explode just by being killed near them, and since when did hornbone become an acceptable heart-staking substitute for wood? Why does wind howl through a bed when a vampire child jumps through it? And if you can't see a vampire in a mirror, why can't you see his clothes either? Are they special vampire clothes, made by vampire children out of vampire cotton in some Mexican sweatshop run by Guillamero Del Toro? This gang of vampires seems to go through about a dozen teenagers a week, who nobody seems to miss ("The mass-murder capital of the world", someone says, maybe justifying their own paranoia but have the cops not heard this yet?). While I do give points for some semi-inspired touches with the vampires (they sleep hanging upside-down like bats, and their fangs grow out of teeth not often chosen to be the vampire-fang-teeth), Lost Boys is also guilty of that annoying, logic-abandoning "if you kill the head vampire, you destroy all the vampires" thing, which...bah, don't even get me started on the "if you kill the head vampire, you destroy all the vampires" thing. The Lost Boys is, to my knowledge, the original squirt-gun-filled-with-holy-water-used-against-vampires movie, a bad lot (Bordello Of Blood, anyone?) which shouldn't have been started in the first place. And I do admit, it offers an interesting interpretation of the belief that you should never invite a vampire into your home. But the romance between Patric and Gertz is a little contrived (I know they're teenagers and are just about squirting hormones out of their eyes, but when did they establish this rapport?), and conveniently, she has exactly the same re-humanification prospects as he does. The score features a repeating, increasingly annoying "Thou shalt not..." theme sung by children, and the dialogue goes for really obvious, easy one-liners ("One big happy family", scary even in 1987? I hope not.) instead of daring to let the characters say something halfways interesting. While there just isn't much that I like about this even at the script level, and while I did say that I'm certainly not among the crowd which gives (way too much of) a shit that Schumacher keeps making these terrible movies, I do have to place most of the blame for this movie's (artistic) failure (big hit, and admittedly still pretty fondly looked back on by most) on his shoulders. The worst scene in the movie has to be a scene where the vampires gang up on and massacre a group of partying teenagers, all to the tune of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way". Now, I know that the only thing more horrible than Aerosmith is Aerosmith rapping. But is Schumacher so unaware of the difference between "horrifying" and "horrible"? This is not a scary or disturbing scene, as it's obviously meant to be. It's just annoying. The close-ups on Sutherland are close and frequent enough to become extremely irritating and distracting, ruining his performance before his descent into total cheese manages to. And check out that video store. That video store stocks a LOT of Warner Bros. titles. Other distressingly unpleasant moments include Corey Haim singing in the bathtub, a Jim Morrison shrine in the vampires' cave, and one scene where, scared of the vampires but not about to talk about them, Haim goes up to his mom and asks if he can sleep with her tonight. Any 14-year-old male who asks to sleep with his mom for any reason is a FREAK (especially when she reminds me of MY mom, that's just disturbing). The Lost Boys ends with a mildly amusing but waaaaaaay too-little-too-late one-liner from grandpa, which only serves to make me ask even more questions. If he knew about the vampires all along, wouldn't he have made some cursory effort to protect his family from them? Thanks a lot, gramps. Bastard. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE