Lost and found: The Lost Boys

What is it about teens and vampires these days? Twilight has gone and made teenage girls all warm and runny in a way that we haven’t seen since Patrick Swayze grabbed Jennifer Gray and growled, “Nobody puts baby in the corner”.

He wasn’t a vampire, in fact he was a pretty nice guy, but that’s not the point. The point is that vampires, especially teen vampires these days seem to be really sweet and fresh faced and gee whizz, mums just love them, and hell nannas even seem to like the buggers.

It wasn’t always like that, there have been teenage vampires over the years, and they haven’t always been so nice. In 1977, George Romero gave us Martin, a lonely Pennsylvania teenager who cuts people’s throats with a razor so that he can feed before his uncle eventually jams a stake through him. In 1979, (and again in 2004 on TV) in the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”, a newly vampirised Danny Glick hovers outside the upstairs window of his less undead buddy Mark Petrie, scratching at the window and begging to be let in.

Danny was particularly unwholesome on two levels. One, he is floating in mid air, and his weirdly glowing eyes are very off putting. On top of this he is being a bad influence, encouraging young mark to come and be a vampire and go out all night biting people. On another level, forget about him being a vampire, he’s a kid and kids just creep me out. Give me a vampire any day.

However, in 1987, director Joel Schumacher, fresh from destroying the “Batman” franchise took being an undead bad boy to new big haired, shoulder pad wearing 1980s levels with the horror comedy, teen vampire, teen rebellion, and teen motorbike riding without helmets movie “The Lost Boys”.

The title, “The Lost boys” is a reference to the bunch of wild boys who refuse to grow up featured in J.M. Barry’s Peter Pan. In fact the original script called for the characters to be 5th or 6th graders, but Schumacher, forced changes to make the vampires teenagers, making them more relevant to the intended audience, non undead teens.

The story centres around Mike Emerson (Jason Patric, of “Speed 2” infamy, though lets face it he is better than Keanu Reeves) and his little brother Sam (Corey Haim, the non “Bad News Bears” half of the legendary cinematic duo “The Coreys”).

They arrive in Santa Carla, California with their newly divorced mother Lucy (Dianne Weist, she was in Parenthood and a bunch of other equally boring things), and settle in with her father, Grandpa (Barnard Hughes, the title character in the classic, 80s TV series “Mr Merlin”. Seriously they made a show where Merlin the magician was alive and well and running a car body shop in San Francisco).

Since its always summer in California, there’s no school yet (and it shows) and everyone goes out exploring their new hometown. Lucy meets the owner of the local video shop, Max (Ed Hermann, from even more boring things than Dianne Weist), who likes the look of her and immediately offers her a job.

While his mum is being productive, young Sam goes off to indulge his taste in contemporary American literature, better known as comic books. At the local comic shop he meets the Frog brothers, Edgar (Corey Feldman, from “Stand by me”, and best known as half of the legendary cinematic duo “The Coreys”) and Alan (Jamison Newlander, who later made an afterschool special about getting AIDS). They not so subtly push Sam toward a comic entitled “Vampires are everywhere”, while hinting that Santa Carla has the highest murder and disappearance rate of any city in the USA, thus offending several other US cities which had also laid claim to that honour in their tourist brochures. For some reason, he doesn’t believe that vampires are responsible.


Mike goes wandering and finds himself at an outdoor concert, watching a saxophone player named Tim Capello, a very muscley saxophone player with skin-tight pants and an awful mullet. He doesn’t watch the concert for long because he catches sight of a pretty young thing in the crowd. He chases her and spots her getting on a motorbike and riding away with a scruffy looking gang leader type.

The following night Mike goes looking for the girl again, and naturally enough, he finds her, finding out that her name is Star (Jami Gertz, she was in Crossroads, the movie that made me love the blues, and some unknown John Hughes movie called “16 Candles). The scruffy gang leader type, whose name is David (Kiefer Sutherland, of “24” fame and he had a cool rifle in “Young guns”) appears and invites him to on a motorbike race/chase/game of chicken, in which Mike almost rides of a cliff into the ocean.

Mike clocks him one, but rather than get all cranky, David invites him to the gang’s hideout, a sunken wreck of a hotel to party with them. After inhaling some local flora, and eating Chinese food which David somehow convinces Mike is maggots and worms, they have him swig from an old wine bottle. Star tries to convince him that it is blood but good old Mike knows better and has a swig and is inducted into the gang. Their nest act is to hang under a rail bridge as a train passes over. One by one the others drop off into the fog until Michael can no longer hang on and falls into the mist below. He wakes up feeling pretty hung-over and sorry for himself the following afternoon (haven’t we all at some stage?)

From this point, Sam notices a few little changes in Mike, he’s sensitive to sunlight, he sleeps all day and goes out all night, and his dog Nanook (ably played by Cody, the Siberian husky) doesn’t like him anymore and even mangles him a bit. And oh yeah, Mike no longer casts any reflection in the mirror.
Just a little bit worried, Sam enlists the aid of the Frog brothers, Santa Clara’s comic specialists and self proclaimed vampire exterminators. For some reason he doesn’t want to follow their advice and stick a stake in his older brother. Obliging fellows that they are, the Frog brothers offer to come around and do it for him.

Mike’s new friends now tell him that they are vampires, and to demonstrate, they massacre a rival gang on the beach. Mike runs away and meets Star, who tells him they are both “half vampires” until they make their first kills. They then proceed to do what teens do when they are not locked up properly.
Through the magic of comics, and being told, Sam discovers that if the head vampire can be killed all half vampires will return to normal. Sam is suspicious of Max, and when he comes to dinner at their home, Sam and the Frog brothers try every trick in the book to expose him as a vampire, only to fail miserably and embarrass Lucy. Not to be deterred the fearless vampire hunters head for the sunken hotel hideout of the gang. They stake the vampire that was played by the dude who was Bill in “Bill and Ted’s great adventure”. His dying screams wake up the rest of the gang and the intrepid vampire killers, plus Mike and Star and a half vampire kid called Laddie barely escape into the daylight.

That night, Lucy and Max are out on a date and Grandpa is off courting some old chook, so the boys have the house to themselves to face off with the remaining three vampires who come to take bloody revenge. Sam shoots one of them through the heart with an arrow, pinning him to the stereo and making him explode, fixing him right up. Another is knocked by the Frog boys into a bathtub full of holy water and garlic cloves, making a very bubbly and no doubt spicy vampire soup, leaving David and his spiky mullet to face off against the rapidly turning Mike.

They scuffle around a bit, bouncing of walls and ceilings and fridges and whatnot, until David is knocked on to a set of antelope horns that Grandpa was in the process of taxiderming. David doesn’t explode or make frothy bubbles, but writhes around for a while and dies bathed in a white light, which is more suggestive of salvation than of normal garden variety impalement.

At this point Lucy and Max arrive home. When Max sees that the vampire gang has been destroyed, he goes all bond villain and explains his whole scheme, which was ultimately to claim Lucy as his vampire wife. He also conveniently explains that since he had been invited in the house, none of the Frog brothers tests had worked (nice little bit of exposition).

Just when Max has everyone where he wants them, and is about to bite Lucy, crazy old grandpa comes ploughing through the wall in his old beat up pickup truck (there’s a lot to be said for licence testing for over 65s). One of the several (need I say it, sharpened) fence posts fly off the roof rack and impales Max quite nicely thank you, sending him into the fireplace where he goes KABOOM!

Naturally, everyone is happy to see grandpa and Mike and Star are freed from the vampire curse but he is not so excited. He grabs a drink from the fridge and utters one of the very best lines in the whole show “One thing I never could stomach about living in Santa Carla, all the damn vampires”. Everyone is stunned that crazy old grandpa knew all along what was happening and the movie fades out.

The Lost Boys is rightly a cult movie. It is the ‘80s encapsulated in 93 minutes. There is some seriously big hair in this movie, and I suspect that the hole in the ozone layer is a result of the hair spray used to keep it all in place. Worse than big hair, if there is such a thing, is the mullet worn by Keifer Sutherland. God I hate mullets, so much. There were also patchwork leather jackets, and those damned skin tight patterned pants, I mean come on, give things some room to breathe.

Lost Boys gets a big 4 fake retractable stakes out of 5, it has the perfect mix of humour and horror and I enjoyed it much more than I remember, but then this time round it is no longer the ‘80s

Another thing, those vampire boys ride motorbikes without helmets, but when you’re undead who cares about head injuries, plus I don’t think that helmets would fit on over all that big hair.

Word count: 1,799