Los Boys

It seems strange that we haven't seen The Lost Boys (1987) until now. Back in the day, some of our gothy friends were so into this movie, they used to get fangs made by dentists for maximum realism. Maybe that's why we never saw it. As a result, we never realized that it was made in Santa Cruz.

It starts with an old van with a mom and two kids rolling into Santa Cruz - re-labelled Santa Carla for the movie, because of course, vampires can't stand la cruz. We see the light house, Boardwalk, and all the hippie and crusty kids. Also, we see people posting flyers for lost children, and graffiti calling Santa Clara "Murder Capital of the World".

It seems that Mom Dianne Weist and her two sons, teen Jason Patric and pre-teen Corey Haim have come to live with their hippy grampa, Bernard Hughes. It's a mixed bag - a new town with a fun beach scene and a lot of murders, lots of kids, but no friends, and not much money. Patric soon spots Jami Gertz and follows her. It turns out that she has some sketchy friends, lead by Keifer Sutherland.

Meanwhile, Haim meets some kids in the comicbook store - Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander, Edgar and Allen Frog, the Frog brothers. They want him to read some vampire comics to learn self-defense. This, you will notice, is the first of the Two Coreys movies. Since the actors were underaged, they spent a lot of time together instead of partying like the older actors.

Somewhere in here, I realized that this is more of a horror-comedy than straight horror. The Frog Bros. are particularly silly - also, every bit of comic book vampire lore they know more or less turns out to be true. Another movie where only the kids know what's going on.

I wasn't as fond of Patric - he had a lopsided smirk for most of the first half of the movie that made him look like Rick Moranis. Keifer Sutherland was pretty impressive, though. He looks debauched and cruel, and that's before he vamps out. I did expect him to bark like Oddball from Kelley's Heroes, though. His gang was equally creepy, except Ms. Spenser had trouble figuring out what kind of gang they were: Were they bikers, new-wavers, street punks? Hair-metal heads is the closest I could figure. Fits with the soundtrack, which was painfully 80's-teen-friendly.

I really enjoyed this, probably because it wasn't as scary or as cheesy as I thought it would be. It was cool that it so clearly took place in Santa Cruz - the geography was right, the trees and bushes were right, even when you weren't at the Boardwalk. Ms. Spenser enjoyed it too, but says it doesn't count as horror, and so I still owe her.