4 gibbles outta 5

Director: Joel Schumacher

Anyone who knows me (which is a short list, admittedly, and probably only consists of my two really, really close friends Beyonce and Lenny Kravitz (whom I refer to as B and LK, respectively (meaning Beyonce and Lenny Kravitz, if that wasn’t clear (meaning I have nicknames for them because we are close, re: my two really close friends B and LK)))) knows I got beef with Joely Schumachy.  In the past we got along, when I taped “Falling Down” off of HBO and showed it to all of my friends over and over again for a substantial profit (ticket price + %50 + required HJs*… that’s right, VHS pirating was my game, and I ain’t ‘fraida no effin’ bulls, censorship bein’ a loada crap.  You try’n stop me, Mr. FBI!  Who wants season 3 of X-Files on 18 VHS tapes?  Any takers?  Call me.), and you know, I was young and angry and just watching R-rated movies so it seemed like good material.  But later, much more experienced in the R-rated genre, I re-watched it and felt that it was sort of a cop out.  Then, suddenly, Schumy’s puttin’ the gay back in Batgayman, making an eye-rollingly “gritty” snuff porn expose, giving Colin Farrell an off-putting goatee, and making undead Nazis really unscary and silly.

So me and him got some beef.  You know, ’cause I paid good money to watch those movies on cable that my parents paid for.  Whatever.

You believe that I’d not seen “Lost Boys” until last week.  Cool.  But based on the years and years of hype, and the cast, and the era, and the director, I was sort of just expecting aged crap, an 80s Twilight that had charm if you’d watched it then but reeked of Schumy if you watched it now.  I was wrong.  I was really impressed by “Lost Boys.”  But might this be due to the production presence of a certain Richard Donner?  Perhaps.

So some teen boys (younger brother Corey Haim and older bro Jason Patric) move to somewhere cool in California with single mum Dianne Wiest to live with grandpa, who seems to match the 1987 yahoo aesthetic that everyone in this town has: every long-haired punk stereotype you weren’t sure whether or not existed DID, I’m told, exist, and was wicked cool back in the time of this dream-boat express of a movie.  Jason and Corey are hanging out at an awesome concert where a ripped dude is all playin’ the sax and Mr. Patric gets a gander of a hottie whom he follows back to the lair of some bikers (i.e. bad boys) led by Kiefer Sutherland.  Corey Haim meanwhile gets distracted by “the frog brothers,” one of whom is Corey Feldman and the other one who got resigned to “weren’t you in that movie” history (hint – he was in the other two Lost Boys movies also).  The brothers frog own a comic book store which, y’know, appealed to me, but just like pseudo-tech movies toss tech-lite gab at the audience to sound like they read the same articles in Wired, we get some silly comic book talk that, uh, I guess was accurate but would make for a frustratingly organized comic book store.  So in terms of comic book store reality, the film gets one star.  ONE FUCKING STAR, HOLLYWOOD.  GET YOUR COMIC BOOK STORE REALITY SHIT TOGETHER.  Lord.

Anyhow, Jason Patric gets vamp sickness and Corey Haim and the frogs wrestle him back from evil to good to wage a war against vampires in this particular CA town, rooting out the leader to finish the whole pack.

Nice and cynical as usual, yes?  Thank yew.  But y’know what?  It works.  It’s funny, it’s actually interesting, thanks to playing loose with the vampire rules – thus allowing the film to make up its own mythology – and inserting enough interesting flashes of most of the main characters to get us concerned about their plight.  Most fascinating, and throwing this in deep contrast to the mega-flash Twilight, of which this was most certainly the progenitor, Lost Boys takes its time ramping up to even telling us what’s what.  If you didn’t know it was a vampire movie, you really don’t know until past the halfway mark, when Schumacher actually gores it up.  That dash of fright is a good release from the filming style, which similarly holds back, saving some fancy 80s camera moves for surreal transitions.

Again, was that Donner’s influence?  Who knows.  The Goonies-esque dark adventure feeling is certainly there, though moodily updated with Schumacher’s energetic and campy sense of the macabre.  Some of it is silly and just movie-filler (I could’ve cared less about Jamie Gertz), and it ends up collapsing into chase-and-attack tedium by film’s end, sort of ruining the cleverness leading up to that point, but dammit – I liked it.

Next week I review more movies you’ve already seen!  Hot damn!

*all viewers had to be Olympic High-Jumpers**, for reasons which are too obvious to explain

**also had to be able to give handjobs***

***which was what I called making sandwiches, for reasons which are, again, seriously, too obvious