The Lost Boys (1987)
Lucy Emerson (Wiest) is a divorced mother of two teenage sons, Michael (Patric) and Sam (Haim), who relocates to the strange oceanside California town of Santa Carla, which is filled with a mix of punk and hippie cultures. The residents of Santa Carla have taken to calling it the “murder capital of the world”, with deaths and disappearances occurring on an increasingly frequent basis. Kiefer Sutherland plays David, the leader of a motorcycle gang that has been terrorizing the community, and one of the members, a sexy female named Star (Gertz), has taken a mutual liking to Michael. Michael wants to get closer to Star, but this proves to be a risk, as David makes him a member of the gang through a blood ritual that ends up turning Michael into a half-vampire (not full until he makes his first kill). With Star’s help, along with his brother Sam and a couple of comic book geeks with vampire knowledge and Rambo-esque personalities named Edgar and Alan (an obvious shout-out to Edgar Allan Poe), aka the Frog Brothers, Michael has to find a way to reverse the curse.
The origin of The Lost Boys toward filmdom starts in early 1985, where a screenplay by first-time screenwriters Janice Fisher and James Jeremias gets scooped up for the whopping total (for its era) of $400k. That script soon gets taken to market by its independent purchasers and garnering the interest of Warner Bros., who secured the North American and some of the international distribution rights.
The first in line to be the director would be Richard Franklin, who made his claim to fame with Hitchcockian efforts like Psycho II, Road Games, and Cloak and Dagger. That changed when Richard Donner came on board as executive producer, and he slotted himself in as the potential director. At that time, the age of the main characters were young boys ranging from 8 or 11 years old, with Donner feeling like he could do the film in the vein of his popular hit from 1985, The Goonies. However, as the production schedule started to slow, Donner grew more interested in shooting the script for Lethal Weapon instead and just stayed onboard on the production side of things, turning over the reins to Joel Schumacher, who describes himself as a longtime vampire film fan, and who had directed St. Elmo’s Fire just the year before for Richard Donner’s wife, Lauren Shuler Donner.
One of the first things that Schumacher wanted was to escalate the ages of the characters to being in high school so he could give the vampires a sexier edge that he thought would make for a much more interesting twist, including the turning of the character of Star from a young boy into a sexy older teen, raising the stakes as a tug of war for the heart of the main vixen. He brought in screenwriter Jeffrey Boam to rewrite the entire script to make it racier and edgier than just “The Goonies meet Dracula” as the original script had been pitched, originally intended to be a rather benign G or PG-rated family film. In this way, Schumacher created a film that would be instantly familiar to teens of the 1980s, but with elements of teen films of the 50s, 60s, and 70s that would also connect with generations just a little older without completely pandering to them, and edgy enough to appeal to those same adults.
Although it has its following, especially from those that enjoy the TV shows which borrow the style of mixing humor, camp, and horror (like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), The Lost Boys (the title is a Peter Pan allusion, due to the flying children and never growing old aspects) is an interesting but fairly silly vampire flick that can’t be taken all that seriously, even during the moments where it tries to be. All in all, perhaps it’s fun for those that regularly feed on teen clique flicks and not-too-serious horror, but it may be too goofy and contrived to please those expecting more than easy pleasures. For genre lovers, it is still a delight, but those looking for more than occasional jocularity and eye candy presentation will likely find the story doesn’t quite hold together to the very end, especially as it descends into either gory or slapstick antics that aren’t quite as satisfying to observe as its build-up.
The best things about The Lost Boys are the bells and whistles. It sports a solid soundtrack, sumptuous location shots (exteriors were filmed in Santa Cruz, especially in and around its famous boardwalk, and the more rural areas that are dense with natural fog), wide-open and constantly moving cinematography from one-time Martin Scorsese favorite Michael Chapman, and an effective score by veteran Thomas Newman. The city council of Santa Cruz allowed the film to shoot on the streets, but only on the condition that they didn’t use the name, as it crowns the city several times as the “Murder Capital of the World”, which they felt would hurt its reputation and tourism industry.
A colorful cast does help flesh out the thin characterizations, with memorable bits for Sutherland, the Coreys (Haim and Feldman), and Barnard Hughes, who plays the grandfather, though they had originally looked at Keenan Wynn and John Carradine for the old man role, but they were too ill at the time to come back to films. Many in the cast were relative unknowns prior to the film, with the exception of Corey Feldman, who gave the movie, and his part, in particular, the Goonies cred they were originally going for before they aged the characters forward. This was the first of many collaborations between “The Coreys”, who would go on to star or appear in seven films together over the following ten years, and occasionally work together from time to time for TV projects that capitalize on their popular pairing.
For the look of the film, Schumacher and his production team concentrated on costumes, sets, and props that would evoke a history throughout the decades, as the vampires, presumably, will live forever, so they should carry along with them those things that speak to them during the totality of their existence as immortals. This does lend well to the film, as it not only is a product of its MTV generation in its execution but seems somewhat without a clear distinction in time within its actual design.
At its core, The Lost Boys is a rite-of-passage story about the allure of “bad boys”, but ultimately the danger of becoming one yourself, especially when succumbing to the rampant peer pressure of high school popularity. Icons from James Dean to Jim Morrison are paid homage to, the latter with the recurrent use of The Doors’ “People Are Strange” (done on the soundtrack in a now-classic cover by Echo and the Bunnymen) and a poster prominently displayed in the vampires’ lair that shows us how much Morrison and Jason Patric look alike, but in both cases, they were the victims of a live-fast-die-young attitude that saw them burn out before their time. Of course, the real allure to the gang of vampires is that you can live fast and not die you, or even ever die, but continue to be “bad boys for life”. But that continued rebellious life comes at a cost of losing one’s connection to family or harming others, which, for anyone with a conscience, makes it not an ideal proposition in the end.
Toward the end of the film, you realize the vampire gambit is to make an even bigger family but to do so would mean having to bring aboard more predators of the innocent so that they could all be together. In the era of the AIDS scare at an all-time high, the notion of losing one’s family values to do something that taints the blood with infection is in the subconscious, returning back to the “family values” era of the Reagan-Bush years in the final years of the 1980s.
With its music-video style editing, attractive actors, a solid soundtrack, and moderately positive critical buzz, the film would go on to be a decent hit at the box office, debuting at the number two position in its first weekend of release, just behind the debut of a new James Bond in Timothy Dalton for The Living Daylights. Over $32 million dollars were earned at the theater on an $8.5 million budget. It would prove to get more of a following over time with the release of other popular vampire properties that made audiences go back and check it out, resulting in it becoming a classic of the genre, and for its era. Perhaps the biggest thing that may have hampered its becoming a runaway smash in its initial box office run was the R rating, especially for a film that feels so much like a movie aimed at the teenage set.
The Lost Boys is a popcorn flick, easily digested but far from a real meal. If you just want 90+ minutes of watchable vampire fodder, it certainly will fit the bill. It will also be of appeal to those that enjoy the 1980s, especially the teen films made in that era. By today’s standards, The Lost Boys is dated. but that has also become part of the charm. It’s like The Goonies meets Rebel Without a Cause, but with vampires, and that last gimmick alone makes it somehow appealing enough for horror fans.
Alas, while certainly slickly produced, it’s just too shallow and empty at its core to recommend to anyone not a genre fan. Near Dark, released the same year, took the teen romance/vampire film into a much more interesting direction, even if it is less slick and broadly appealing, and I recommend that as well as a companion piece.
- Schumacher had proposed a sequel in the early 1990s that would have been called The Lost Girls, but it would never get much farther than a couple of script treatments. A poorly regarded direct-to-DVD sequel called The Lost Boys: The Tribe emerged in 2008 with Feldman and Haim as part of the cast, and a follow-up in 2010 called The Lost Boys: The Thirst with Feldman and fellow Frog brother Jamison Newlander.
Qwipster’s rating: B
MPAA Rated: R for violence, gore, sensuality, and language
Running Time: 97 min.
Cast: Jason Patric, Corey Haim, Kiefer Sutherland, Dianne Wiest, Jami Gertz, Barnard Hughes, Corey Feldman, Edward Herrmann, Jamison Newlander, Brooke McCarter, Billy Worth, Alex Winter
Director: Joel Schumacher
Screenplay: Jeffrey Boam, Janice Fisher, James Jeremias