THE LOST BOYS@35

A woman and her two sons move into a seaside Californian town whose welcome billboard is backed with graffiti describing it as the murder capital of the world. Well, it's where her dad lives and they can settle rent-free until she gets back on her feet and get started again after the divorce. Meantime, there's a boardwalk carnival at night and she goes around the shops asking about jobs while older boy loses himself in the crowd at a concert and younger boy meets the local comic shop brothers who send him off with a manual for fighting vampires done in panels. Older boy, let's call him Michael, sees the beautiful young Star in the crowd and pursues her through it, ending in the sight of the teen bike gang she's part of as she hops on the back of the leader's machine. They invite Michael to ride with them. He does and it's a fine ol' eighties pumpin' trip.

Joel Schumacher's take on the vampire sub genre has him setting it in the teen cinema of the era with an extra push. Just as Spielberg covered the under tens audience and dictated what such movies should look like, so John Hughes eightiesed up the teen saga, blending serious issues of the age group with a pastel toned finish and few exceptions took the adolescent experience outside of the program. While The Lost Boys didn't have the iconoclastic force of Heathers or the pre-Hughes oomph of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it does use the cultural flow of the Hughes template to escape it. 

Keifer Sutherland's David could have been in the Breakfast Club but Judd Nelson couldn't have been in Lost Boys (thank Heaven and Hell!). Dianne Wiest and Barnard Hughes are written just short of Ferris Bueller caricatures but Jason Patric's persistent sadness would have been resolved in a sex scene with Hughes. The point of departure is in the genre and the vampires here are eighties rockstars (they even nest in a trashed hotel). If anything, the melancholy beneath the notion of eternal youth here comes from the implication that eternity will just be neverending hijinks of rapidly diminishing returns. Michael in his in between state takes on a kind of indy rock star shades in bed look but he seems treading fever rather than rising from it. For all the Hughesian epiphanies and pleas for young rockin' rebels to calm down and accept themselves there was never such a sobering portrait of wasted youth.

The Lost Boys not only knows it's a teen movie of its time but loves the fact. All the sax wielding, engine revving, rebel yelling pranks and the clothes and hair of a youth culture that got to punk so late that it looked like old glam, all of that is flashing like fireworks on screen. Even the joke of the final line puts it on the timeline. But this is a case where you're glad of the datedness of a film. As with an Easy Rider or a Hard Day's Night, you want it to sing the hits, however naff they would be out of context. Worth at least an annual revisit.