Sixteen Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #10 The Lost Boys

 Here I was, thinking that this was going to be a throwaway post.  I re-watched The Lost Boys (in my head, it's just Lost Boys) last night because a coworker and I were talking about appropriate horror movies for his fourteen year old daughter.  He's been slowly introducing her to things like Poltergeist and Alien and she is NOT impressed when he squirms and jumps at these iconic movies - that TERRIFIED ALL OF US back in the day.  I suggested The Lost Boys and he was like, ooh good one, and I wondered if she'd balk at the 80s of it all, and he said that she loves Stranger Things, and I said well, I have it on DVD if you have something still to play DVDs on, and he's like, OF COURSE I DO.  But then that night, at home, I thought I should rewatch it to see if it really is appropriate for a fourteen year old because it's rated R and what the hell do I know about what a fourteen year old should watch.

And here's why I thought it would be a throwaway post because I LOVE The Lost Boys and I rewatch it a lot and I was sure that I had done a post here about it within the last couple of years.  But I can't find a post.  And I think maybe I've never included it in a Scarelicious post?

ANYWAY The Lost Boys is AWESOME and you should watch it, or watch it again.  It came out in 1987 and it is soooooooooo 80s - but like real 80s.  It was largely filmed in Santa Cruz (California), on its boardwalk, and you can tell - especially in the opening bits - that these are real folks, not actors: punks, New Wavers, dudes in Speedos, street kids.  The soundtrack is amazing and I'm pretty sure I bought it on cassette when the movie came out.

It's a vampire flick - nearly a horror-comedy with some serious 80s music video style (Joel Schumacher was the director, if that tells you anything).  And it has some surprisingly brutal violence in one or two scenes, something that I always forget in the face of all that hair and shoulder pads and Kiefer Sutherland's bleached-blond snarling and the beauty that is that era's Jason Patric.  The cast is amazing: Kiefer and Jason, plus the Coreys (Haim and Feldman), and Jamie Gertz, and Dianne Weist, and Alex Winter (of Bill and Ted fame), and Edward Herrmann (of Gilmore Girls fame).  Basically, a divorced mom and her two boys move in with her father, in a seaside town that is overrun with vampires.  That's all you need to know about the plot.  Seriously, I adore this movie.