October Horror Season 2: Day 7

Vampire week concludes with 1987's "The Lost Boys" starring Kiefer Sutherland and the Coreys.



I was looking forward to this one because when I was but a wee lad I took a "College For Kids" course about horror movies and monsters taught by a Professor R. Cane.  It was pretty neutered by necessity, since you can't really show the full gamut of gore to a class of pre-pubescent boys; however, The Lost Boys was tame enough and apparently "classic" enough for a few scenes to make the cut.  So based on my limited preview of it and the implication that it somehow inspired vampire movie lore, I was pretty excited to finally see it.

After having watched it, I do not find myself disappointed.  It's not the groundbreaking film I may have thought it was when I was younger, if I had seen it then I probably would've been disappointed.  I've since developed a more even perspective and had brought down my expectations, and at that level it was actually pretty good.  I enjoyed watching it and thought the vampires were pretty imaginative.  They actually looked like they may have played a large part in influencing the Buffy The Vampire Slayer vampires, more so the series than the movie.  Also, considering that last night I watched Dracula 3000 which have vampires in coffins in space 1000 years in the future, I really enjoyed that the Lost Boys vampires didn't sleep in coffins.  Actually, they had funky mutated bat feet that let them hang from the ceiling of their cave, which would've looked supremely creepy at first if it had not been for Bill S. Preston, Esquire's weird-ass mullet.  The vampire action aspects were all very well done, although the kill scene at the end where blood shoots from all the plumbing in the house was beginning to remind me of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.

The movie suffered, actually, because of its vampire hunters.  The entire comic shop hunter plot was made of pure cheese but played so straight by Corey Feldman it almost hurt.  The odd "Oh yeah, we probably ought to include a romance" aspects of it also brought things down.  I did enjoy the fake-out twist at the end, despite living in a post-Shyamalan world.  I would enjoy a version of the film with this stuff taken out and focusing purely on a divorced mother with 2 teenage sons moving to an unfamiliar town that just happens to be teeming with vampires to live with her father.

Tomorrow we begin Monster week with "Swamp Thing"