The Lost Boys

THE LOST BOYS

A vampire film from 1987 that’s inexplicably well-loved (as evidenced by its high rating on the Internet Movie Database), The Lost Boys follows a kid named Sam and his older brother Michael as they acclimate to their new home in California with their divorced mother and her eccentric father.  A young lady named Star catches Michael’s eye on the local boardwalk, and he follows her through the crowd until she gets on a motorcycle with a guy named David and rides off into the night.  Sam befriends a couple of other kids (the Frog brothers) who work at a comic book shop and tell him that the area crawls with vampires.  Michael encounters Star and David (along with three other motorcycle-riding dudes) again, and David challenges Michael to follow him.  They end up in an underground hangout (the remains of a hotel that fell into the ground around the turn of the century due to an earthquake) where Michael swills from a bottle of red liquid despite Star’s warning that it is blood.  Turns out that David and his buddies are vampires, and they want Michael to join their pack.  Sam realizes that Michael has begun to transform into a vampire when he notices his brother’s transparent reflection in a mirror.  According to the lore provided by the Frog brothers, Michael (and Star, who is also transforming) can be saved if the head vampire dies before the half-vampires make their first kills.  Sam and the Frogs set out to destroy the pack of vampires.  A subplot follows the mother of Sam and Michael as she gets involved in a relationship with her new boss (Max).  In the finale, the vampires assault the house where Sam and Michael live.  Ultimately the family vanquishes the head vampire (who turns out to be Max and not David), and Star & Michael (and a little kid named Laddie who was also turning into a bloodsucker) become human again.

I’m stumped by the appeal of this film, which has quite a few rabid fans.  There’s a scene where Michael (distraught by the fact that he’s changing into a monster and looking for a way to save himself) abruptly has sex with Star, who he barely knows, and the moment felt horribly forced and shoehorned into the narrative.  I enjoyed parts of act three (there’s a particularly cool vampire death when a dog knocks one of the undead bikers into a bathtub full of holy water), but I was unengaged throughout most of the movie.  Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what I’m missing.