YMMV / The Lost Boys

• Awesome Music:
  • "Cry Little Sister", the haunting goth rock theme song by Gerard McMahon. It perfectly establishes the film's atmosphere in the opening scene, and is extremely fitting not just for The Lost Boys, but many other vampire stories (given how often it gets used in fan videos for various vampire-themed works). McMahon also stated that he didn't write the song to "be specific to the vampire. I wanted it to be about the longing for family from a rejected youth's perspective, which I went through myself and that many of us have felt.", so it's a great listen even if you aren't into vampires. It's so awesome, it's been covered and remixed by many other musicians for other works over the years, including by Marilyn Manson for The New Mutants and Titans (2018).
  • Echo & the Bunnymen's cover of "People Are Strange" by The Doors certainly stands out.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The soundtrack is filled with unrestrained 80s-ness, then ends with this.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Thirst: Peter is known publicly as the brother of vampire novelist Gwen Lieber, but secretly is the Alpha Vampire and Gwen's alleged lover. He is seemingly held hostage by DJ X, who uses Peter's blood to make a drug to create vampires. However, once DJ X is killed, Peter takes control of the consumers, nearly sending them into a feeding frenzy. Upon being revealed as the Alpha Vampire, we are treated to a flashback of him leading a vampire attack on a village. He offers Gwen a chance to become a vampire if she brings him Edgar and Alan Frog, and once she does, he kills her. He reveals that his true intentions all along were to turn Edgar and Alan into vampires themselves, so they could be his personal hitmen and cull the expanding vampire race to preserve the population of people to feed on. Since Alan is already transforming, Peter uses his partial control over Alan to force him to fight Edgar.
  • The Lost Boys: The Beginning: In the script written for the unproduced prequel of the original film, Vlad Tepsch is a legendary vampire king known as "The Impaler" for how he dispatches his victims. First arriving in America while butchering the crew of a ship he's aboard, after being mugged, Vlad chases down the Lost Boys and begins to slowly turn them into vampires. Seeming to have their best interests at heart, Vlad helps make the boys rich and acquire ownership of a extravagant hotel, while killing random people all around him, from hotel guests to a gang to a unit of Marines. Later, Vlad reveals his intent to use the coastline of San Francisco to create armies of vampires and a worldwide empire for himself to rule over. When David tries to leave him, Vlad forcibly turns his girlfriend Anastasia Rostov into a vampire as a "gift", causing the girl to commit suicide out of terror, and makes it clear to the boys that he sees them as mere soldiers he can easily throw away.
• Director Displacement: Richard Donner produced the movie, but Joel Schumacher directed it, due to Donner's commitment to Lethal Weapon (1987).
• Draco in Leather Pants: All the Lost Boys tend to get this treatment to varying degrees due to their attractiveness and Evil Is Cool factor, but David especially gets this treatment as he tends to come off as more civil than the others and appears to genuinely care for his gang and potential members like Michael. However, they are all still unrepentant murderers who gleefully terrify and kill innocent people, and actively trick people into joining the gang (including kidnapping and turning a young child).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Tim Cappello as the the oily saxophone player on the dock is surprisingly memorable among viewers of the film. He even has a fan page!
  • Nanook is pretty well-liked for his cute bond with Sam and being a Heroic Dog at several key moments.
• First Installment Wins: The original 1987 film is widely considered one of the best vampire movies ever, and ended up having quite the lasting impact on vampire portrayals in pop culture. The direct-to-video sequels...well, a lot of people don't even know they exist, and those that have watched them generally don't have much good to say.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Sam and Michael make jokes about marijuana and crack cocaine, which are less funny after Corey Haim became a drug addict and ultimately died prematurely.
  • The vampires' lair is in the ruins of a hotel destroyed by the 1906 Earthquake. The town of Santa Cruz, where the movie was filmed, was badly damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. The bandstand where the concert was filmed and the Frog brothers' comic book store were both destroyed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Take a look at the drying vampire gore on the heroes' clothes when they flee the hotel after their daytime raid. It's strangely...sparkly.
  • Kiefer Sutherland playing a vampire was funny enough as it was, but then Robot Chicken took it to the next level by having Dracula replace Jack Bauer as the lead.
  • Joel Schumacher directing a movie about creatures with a bat motif, especially since Sam walks into a comic book store looking for Batman comics. This also doubles as a Creator Thumbprint, as in that same scene, Sam asks for Superman comics as well (Executive Producer Richard Donner worked on the first two Superman movies).
    • Related to this is the fact that actor Robert Pattinson would also have a career-shift from attractive vampires to the caped crusader.
  • Two members of David's posse are named Star and Marko.
• Ho Yay:
  • David and Michael. Just... David and Michael. David pretty much seduces him in a strange blood-drinking sequence, half-hypnotises him with continuous usage of his name and makes him hallucinate, ignores the pretty love interest in favor of Michael, and spends the whole movie trying desperately to get Michael to see things his way. Never mind David's insistence on this leads to him dropping his guard, therefore leading to his death... he never makes a move to kill Michael, even when his victim flatly refuses to become a full vampire. David actually looks genuinely hurt by his rejection. The amount of eyesex and shimmering sexual tension in this film concerning these two is just amazing.
  • There's a lot of subtext in the movie overall. For example, Michael has to drink David's blood (a bodily fluid) to lose half his humanity, and it can be argued that Star and Laddie create the guise of a traditional nuclear family so Michael is more easily lured in.
  • A little Truth in Television here, as Joel Schumacher was gay, and vampires were (and still are) commonly used to represent the AIDS crisis, which was at its height in the 80s and hit the gay community particularly hard. There's actually a few articles floating around on homoerotic subtext in the movie — you can read one here.
  • There's also Sam and Michael being mesmerized by the oily saxophone player on the docks.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Max the video store owner is secretly the head vampire, and the "father" of the Lost Boys. Desiring to find a wife and a mother to his vampiric "boys," Max uses his charm and genuine politeness to enchant the recently divorced Lucy Emerson into going out with him while staying beneath suspicion. Instructing his Lost Boys to vampirize her children so that they can be a happy family, Max goes on multiple dates with her. When entering Lucy's home, Max ensures he is invited in, rendering him immune to tests which would reveal his vampiric nature. When tested and accused by Lucy's son Sam, he quickly and effortlessly spins a narrative that the boy is afraid Max will try to replace his father, discrediting him further. Taking Lucy for a date at his house, Max returns to hers to find the Lost Boys killed. Calmly lamenting the circumstances and their deaths, he reveals his true nature, never letting up his kind tone, and threatens Sam to ensure Lucy will agree to being turned and marrying him due to his genuine care for her, being stopped mere seconds from victory, and only by something he never could have predicted.
  • David is the leader of the vampire gang under his "father" and sire Max. A wild, brash youth with a calculating mind, David is the one who scouts out Michael and grows impressed with him. Tricking him into drinking his blood, David sways Michael to the dark side while showing him the true nature of vampirism. Upon the death of one of their gang, David lays siege to the home of the Emersons, still attempting to pull Michael into darkness during their final battle. In the comics, David returns, masterminding the slaughter of the vampire hunters of Santa Carla and ending with a vial of elder blood in victory.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • All the god damn vampires!
  • The oily saxophone player, portrayed by Tim Capello, has become part of the basis for general sexy saxophone man jokes.
• Older Than They Think: This movie used the phrase "vamping out" before Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Plus, the main vampire is a badass with blond hair and wears leather, not unlike Spike.
• Once Original, Now Common: Given that it set the tone for works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, viewers tend to forget how different this movie was when it first came out. It was one of the first works to portray vampires as trendy teenagers rather than old-fashioned aristocrats, which subsequently became a popular portrayal for vampires.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • David is Jack Bauer... which actually explains a lot about Jack.
  • Alex Winter is one of his mooks.
  • Taylor Townsend is the female lead in The Tribe.
  • The Manhattan District Attorney is dating one of the narrators for The History Channel.
• Strangled by the Red String: Michael and Star have sex when they barely know each other, although it's strongly indicated they're having Sex for Solace out of despair over their predicament. Plus, they're both Hormone Addled Teens who have previously expressed attraction to each other.
• Squick: The maggots and worms that David hypnotizes Michael into seeing instead of Chinese takeout food, made doubly so by hearing Word of God's instructions to budding filmmakers that maggots tend to just lie there. How do you get them to wriggle? Squeeze lemon juice on them.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The fashions are aggressively 1980s. The Lost Boys have hair metal-inspired costumes, and Michael gets one ear pierced with a dangling earring in an early scene. Sam also wears a gold stud in one ear and some incredibly colorful, baggy shirts that even other characters remark are gaudy.
  • Lucy gets a job working at a video store renting out VHS cassettes. Not much job security there.
  • There's a conversation about TV Guide, a relic of the days when you needed published programming listings to know what was going to be on television. Sam is confused by Grandpa reading it, since he doesn't have a television, making it useless. The modern TV Guide is more like a magazine with articles and would actually be more useful for Grandpa's intended use.
  • Tim Capello's shirtless saxophone performance is treated as the hip sound of teens and headbangers.
  • Pretty much all the city scenes are draped in neon.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The make-up for the vampires looks incredible and holds up extremely well to this day, making the vampires look predatory in an elegant sort of way. The luminous red-gold contact lenses really help complete the look, which almost offsets the fact they were highly uncomfortable to wear for the actors.

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