Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 1: The Lost Boys

Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 1: The Lost Boys

October is here! Halloween is my favorite holiday, so I like to get as much out of the month as possibly I can, and I've found that the best way to do that is to watch a Halloween-related movie every day of October. So, to start things off I watched an 80's cult classic for the very first time: The Lost Boys.

This movie has a lot going for a teenage audience: sexy vampires, motorcycles, cool music, comic books, evil grownups, and an oddly specific fascination with Jim Morrison. The cult status certainly tracks, and in some ways it's earned, because a modern take on the vampire mythology was a novel idea at the time, and vampires have always been a subject that young people have a natural fascination with due to the whole "eternal youth" thing.

The problem I have with The Lost Boys is it's kind of a tonal mess. The vampire plot with the older brother has a dangerous, sexy edge to it which seems to be what Joel "Director of Batman and Robin" Schumacher wanted the predominant tone of the movie to be, but then there's the plot with the younger brother and two other kids trying to hunt the vampires, which is like The Goonies but more hardcore (even featuring Cory Feldman), and then there's a wacky grandpa character who seems to have escaped from a silly John Hughes movie. If the focus was entirely on the teen vampires it could've been a lot more interesting, and if the focus was entirely on the boys hunting vampires that still could've been fun, but when equal time is given to both plots it causes the tone to teeter all over the place. Throw in a crazy grandpa and you've got yourself one pretty unbalanced movie.

Although the script isn't great (apart from the tone, the dialogue is far from memorable), the filmmaking is solid. There's some cool camera work and fun makeup and practical effects that definitely make the movie worth watching. Creativity can be found in almost every scene, it's just not always presented in quite the right way.

It's worth seeing once as an adult, and I'd highly recommend it to teenagers.

Oh, and even though I think the grandpa character is bizarre and ridiculous, he gets to deliver one of the best final lines in a movie I've ever heard, although it's a punchline that really only works if it has an hour and a half setup.