Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

Sweaty shirtless saxophone shredding. Of all the images from Joel Schumacher’s 1987 campy vamp romp The Lost Boys, the shots of muscular oiled-up Tim Cappello, humping the air while blowing the riff for “I Still Believe”, have transcended their origin and exist now in the upper echelon of GIFdom. The beach concert cameo from the ponytailed performer, who had appearances in the music videos for both of Tina Turner’s cuts from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome two years prior, obviously doesn’t contribute to the movie’s plot but it comes close to summing up its setting and spirit. Steeped in the carefree decadence of 1980s coastal California, the film’s primary backdrop of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk perfectly encapsulates the up-all-night defiance and eternally youthful energy emanating from the bell of its horn.

Standing in for Santa Cruz throughout The Lost Boys is the fictitious town of Santa Carla, where the recently divorced Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) relocates with her sons Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim). The older Michael immediately becomes smitten with Star (Jami Gertz), even though she’s embedded in a rough crowd of biker boys who aren’t allowed on the boardwalk. The gang is led by the Billy Idol-looking David (Kiefer Sutherland), who notes Michael’s attraction to Star and takes the “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” approach with the new kid in town. After pressure from David and his crew, Michael drinks from a bottle filled with blood and learns of their secret the hard way: they’re all vampires, and now, he is too.

At the same time, Sam garners interest from brothers Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan Frog (Jamison Newlander), thanks to Sam’s expertise in comic book lore. He thinks they’ve read one issue too many when they intimate that Santa Carla is secretly overrun with vampires but after Sam notices several alarming changes in Michael, he takes the claims of the Frog Brothers more seriously. The three set out to eliminate the head vampire that turned all of the teens in town, hoping that cutting the head off the proverbial snake will free them from their vampirism. All the while, they’re fending off another threat in the form of Max (Edward Herrmann), Lucy’s boss at the local video store who sure seems like he’s aiming to be Michael and Sam’s new stepdad.

Richard Donner, who was originally slated to direct The Lost Boys before he was offered Lethal Weapon, stayed on the film in an executive producer role and his influence is felt most in the Amblinesque plotline with Sam and the Frog boys. Their ragtag mission to take out the vampire trash is like a horror-tinged riff on what happened further up the coast in the Goon Docks in 1985’s Donner-directed The Goonies, which also starred Corey Feldman. He was a bit of a ubiquitous figure the entire decade, so it’s perhaps inevitable that this movie has ties to 1986’s Stand By Me, which also features Kiefer Sutherland as a menacing gang leader and a pivotal scene set on train tracks. The railway sequence in Schumacher’s film is significant enough that it was used as the artwork for the 35th anniversary 4K release in 2022, replacing the rebellious floating head poster.

You don’t have to look hard to find homoerotic subtext in a Joel Schumacher movie and The Lost Boys is no exception. David is initially introduced as a romantic competitor to Michael, calling Star over to his motorcycle after Michael spends some time with her on the boardwalk. Challenging Michael to a bike race to Hudson’s Bluff, David leads the way through increasingly foggy surroundings until Michael catches up with him and Star on their bike. With editor Robert Brown, Schumacher cuts between Michael gripping the phallic throttle and brow-drenched close-ups of him and David gyrating over the bumpy terrain. As they make their way into the vampiric lair, there’s an element of seduction in the way David outlines their hedonistic way of life before offering Michael that fateful bottle. Their cave even sports that legendarily, devil-may-care photo of Jim Morrison, paralleled by the “People Are Strange” cover Echo & The Bunnymen contribute to the soundtrack.

Fog continues to play a crucial role in the scenes that outline Michael’s initiation into the bad boy bunch. Walking down a shrouded railway bridge, the gang members drop one by one to hang off the track bars below. “Come with us, Michael,” David whistles before leaping down and leaving Michael above the four of them with a decision to join or not. As he tentatively crawls down, their feet dangle over dense fog while a train passes furiously above them. David bellows, “You are one of us, Michael!” as he lets go after the rest of his rapscallions have done the same. Michael dangles there, hanging on to the conventions of heteronormativity and tempted to join the boys in their mysterious but alluring lifestyle. You can actually hear David flirtatiously chuckle the moment before Michael’s fingers relent and he joins them in the misty unknown below. It’s no accident the next cross dissolve is to Michael crashing onto his bed at home, dirty and spent after a long night.

If it seems like I’ve written Michael’s name quite a few times in this piece, it’s nothing compared to the amount of times characters in The Lost Boys utter the main character’s name. There are no fewer than 100 mentions of “Michael” and its derivations (Mike, Mikey, et al.) out of the mouths of the ensemble cast through the 97-minute runtime; I’m not great at math but that’s an average of more than 1 every minute. It’s not clear to me exactly why his name pops up so frequently in the dialogue but it could point to a larger 1980s horror trope, as Siskel & Ebert pointed out in their 1988 review of Poltergeist III. Fortunately, the script by the “J” trio of Janice Fischer, James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam does have more than “Michael” on its mind and peppers in some fun one-liners to break up the brooding teen melodrama. They even save the best for last, as the film’s fun final line is delivered with memorable cantankerousness by the oddball grandpa character, played by Barnard Hughes.