What is so cool about the Lost Boys Movie? (1987) - Review and Spoilers

This is an oldie but goodie. It changed horror movies for the better making it okay for monsters to be modern and sexy, while introducing more black humor that ever before.

I personally love it, so I am writing this review and if you keep reading, some spoilers and food for discussion below (don't worry I will let you know when to stop reading if you want to avoid them).

Brothers Sam and Michael Emerson move from Phoenix to Santa Carla, California with their mother Lucy, after she divorced their father. They are broke and move in with grandpa, an eccentric embalmer that lives out of the city.

They try to fit in, each in its own way. Michael, the oldest, falls head over heels about a young girl she sees in a public concert. He follows her to find out she is leaving with the leader of a gang of young bikers. However, she likes him too and the gang seems to accept Michael after some odd initiation ritual.

Lucy is searching for a job in the fair boardwalk and meets Max, who owns a video store. He offers a job and ask Lucy out on a date.

In the meanwhile, Sam meets with Edgar and Allan Frog while browsing the shelves of a comic book store. They warn him that Santa Carla is full with Vampires and give Sam a Vampire comic with their number on its back claiming it can save his life.

And it is all vampire slaying from that on!

Yes, you sure do!

These are all good reasons to watch The Lost Boys movie:

• It is pure entertainment: it is short, only an hour and a half long, but it is all fun and action from beginning to the end.
• It was one of the first films that treated vampirism from a modern (and ironic) point of view.
• It is very 80s. If you lived that decade it will take you back. If you didn’t live that era, well, it's like an historic experience including the unbelievable silly clothing and big hairstyles.
• It was the first movie where we had the Two Coreys, for better or worse.
• It is a sexy movie, although sincerely its “R” rating seems too high for today’s standards. It’s all in the characters’ chemistry. There’s no boobs on screen though (which is strange for a 80s film).
• It includes several unforgettable quotes, including the phrase that coined the term “vamp out” for posterity.

Okay, from now on there´s going to be lots of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen this movie and plan to watch it, stop reading now and come back after.

At first, The Lost Boys seem to be a reference to a lost generation, young people without a purpose who do drugs, ride bikes and get, well, lost. It seems to be a moral statement.

Max, the head vampire, is attracted to Lucy for her kindness and he tells her constantly that “boys need discipline.”

In the end it is for her for that Max sent David and the gang lure Michael so she won’t reject becoming a vampire if Michael and Sam are turned. He wants to complete his vampire family!

However that is not why the movie is called the Lost Boys. The original script had younger kids as protagonists and Star was not a girl. The name was an allusion to Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, who never aged in Neverland.

Joel Schumacher (Director) thought that it had to be teenagers in the movie to make it sexier, and I think he was right.

Much of the appeal of the movie has to do with the gang’s misbehavings and the attraction Michael feels for Star, who’s controlled by dangerous David, their leader. The cool outfits and the sexual tension would not be possible otherwise.

In the end, all of them were just kids for Max, as he tells Lucy. He expected them to “become one happy family” with him as a father and her as the mother.

Santa Carla, California is fictional, but many of the scenes of the movie were filmed in Santa Cruz, Ca. - which means Holy Cross in Spanish (That's a name for a vampire city!) – If you pay attention the city’s real name appear in a few scenes by mistake.

If you are interested enough, click on the video below. It compares scenes of the movie with actual locations in Santa Cruz.

You have young men and women with long hair, dressed in leather, riding bikes, living in a sunken hotel and doing whatever they wanted with no supervision.

If you were a teenager back then you would want to be a vampire.

And then there is Micheal and Star and their hot attraction for each other. It is amazing that a movie that lets almost no skin show can have that strong sexual component.

It is also a romantic fantasy: Michael completely falls head over hills a girl he just seen in a concert and follows her into a dark world, fights the monsters and ends up saving her.

Yeap . . . sexy.

Santa Carla is infested with vampires and people go missing every day. Somebody should have noticed by now!

And they did, two brothers are on watch and when Sam gets into their comic shop they give him a comic where he can learn to identify a vampire and to kill it.

This movie was one of the first that took the vampire lore and translated to modern times. What if vampires were among us today? How would they live? How would the old rules apply then?

Drinking Blood

Michael’s transformation begins after he drinks blood from a jeweled wine bottle. The blood is first believed to be David’s but we discover later it is Max’s.

Neither Michael, Star or Laddie have tasted human blood since their transformation. This lets them turn human again after they kill the other vampires.

It is not clear if the bite of a vampire will turn you into one, but it is somewhat implied by the fact that they expected Michael to turn Sam.

It is not clear what the gang does with all the people they kill. No other vampires appear in the movie. So either the bite of a vampire won’t turn you into one or they made sure no one they didn’t want was coming back.

The cast of The Lost Boys have been involved in some scandals. Also people have follow their careers to some extent. If you want to know what happened, watch these videos:

Hallucinations:

In the vampires’ lair Michael believes he is eating maggots when it is only rice, and then he drinks blood believing it is wine. It is not clear if this is an effect of a vampire power or if it was just suggestion.

Mirrors:

Vampires do not reflect on mirrors, as it shows when Michael starts transforming and his image is translucent.

Garlic:

Although Sam and the Frog brothers try to use garlic as defense, vampires claim that it has no power whatsoever.

Holy Water:

But holy water does; it burns into vampire’s flesh as acid.

Flying:

Vampires can fly. It is a little ambiguous and we do not know how high, for how long or under what conditions they do it.

The gang attacks a security guard and a punk couple in what seems to be a flying attack.

When Michael is turning into a vampire, he levitates without being able to control it. When he falls from a bridge he has no recollection about how he got home.

Star moves from the entrance to the second floor window in a matter of seconds.
When David and Michael fight, they could be flying.

Inviting vampires into your home:

Vampires can come inside a house uninvited, but they can be harmed then.

When Max comes to dinner, he asks Michael for his permission to come into the house. When Sam and the Frog brothers try to test Max with garlic, reflecting on a mirror and holy water – these do not work at all. Inviting a vampire home could mean they are safe from their other weaknesses.

An alternate theory is that - being older - Max has developed a resistance to these elements. In this case inviting vampires in has nothing to do with this.

Animals:

Nanook reacts against Michael when he tries to attack Sam in the bathroom. And a vampire when the gang attack the house, but it does not attack vampires that are not attacking (Star, laddie, Micheal).

Max has a dog named Thorns who goes after Lucy when she visits Max’s house during the day. According to the comic the frog brothers give Sam, vampires use dogs as “hounds of hell” to protect their lairs during the day.

Chain of Command:

You have to kill the head vampire and if you have not tasted human blood, you can turn back into human. It is not clear if Marko, Dwayne and Paul were turned by Max or by David. Star didn’t know about Max.

They filmed two other movies as sequels to The Lost Boys. To tell you the truth I’ve never come to watch them because almost everybody who has watched them told me to stay away.

It is not clear if David fooled the gang into believing he was the master vampire.

Did they all drank Max’s blood? or David turned everybody with his own blood and because Max turned David into a vampire, it wouldn’t be over until Max was gone.

Either way, in this movie there is not a strong vampire master-son relation or they would have known whose master they were bound to.

Foreshadowing

There are two scenes that foreshadow the order and way the Lost Boys (vampires) will die.

At the very beginning of the movie, there’s a scene on the merry go round, where the vampire gang does “the walk” (showing us how cool they are) in the exact sequence they die: Marko, Paul, Dwayne and David last.

Then, in another scene Edgar Frog is lecturing Sam about how vampires die: “some yell and scream, some go quietly, some explode, some implode." The first three (Marko, Paul and Dwayne) all die screaming and yelling, David "dies" quietly, Max explodes, and Micheal, Star and Laddie become human again (imploding).

Thanks for reading this long review!

I hope that you enjoy The Lost Boys as much as I do. Vampire movies Rock! and this is one of the best vampire movies ever.

Do you agree or disagree? Feel free to leave any comments below.