Our local Lost Boys are quite notorious in our quiet little coastal town.  So much so that Holly wood decided to capture their slightly fabricated story on celluloid’s eternal showing.  While the film is quite entertaining, please be aware that it is a fabrication and the Lost Boys would be quite perturbed if anyone actually thought they could be exterminated in such a way.  They laugh at such a notion.

The Lost Boys, filmed in the summer of 1986 in Santa Cruz, California (with sets in Los Angeles) and released in the summer of 1987 by Warner Brothers, stars Corey Feldman, Jamison Newlander, Corey Haim, Dianne Weist, Edward Herrmann, Barnard Hughes, Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Jason Patric, Alex Winter, Billy Wirth, Brooke McCarter and Chance (Michael) Corbitt.

When Lucy (Weist) divorced her husband, she figured it was time to uproot the family from Phoenix, Arizona to Santa Carla, California to start anew.  So she and her two sons, Michael (Patric) and Sam (Haim) made the drive to the sleepy, coastal tourist town and moved in with Lucy’s father, Grandpa (Hughes), who lived on a rather large, secluded plot of land in the mountains, well away from town.  He doesn’t like to get any closer than that.

Of course, there appeared to be an adjustment period, especially since the family’s flat broke and the home was blissfully free of an MTV presence although the TV Guide was always floating around somewhere.  What an adjustment to make!  However, the thumping nightlife of the Boardwalk and Municipal Wharf captured everyone’s attention.

With his love of comic books, Sam immediately honed in on the Boardwalk’s sole comic book shop, seemingly owned by a couple of hippie stoners but obviously run by their sons, Edgar (Feldman) and Alan (Newlander) Frog.  It’s there that Sam got his first warning about the strange goings-on in the town of Santa Carla but he chalked it up to the inhalation of too much old newsprint fumes on the brothers’ part and stuck to what he knew best: comics and the Brat Pack.

Michael, wanting nothing more than to fit in, be cool and make the best he can of a crappy situation, caught the eye of a pretty gypsy-looking girl named Star (Gertz) who looked to be babysitting her little brother, Laddie (Corbitt).  Michael’s infatuation only grew more intense as his time on the boardwalk wore on.  So much so that he wasn’t even thwarted by the toughs she rode with.

Lucy, being the more responsible adult that she is, kept to the more sedate municipal wharf doing one part wandering around and one part job-hunting.  The owner of Max’s Video, none other than Max (Herrmann) himself, was attracted to her overtly motherly instinct when she helped a lost little boy and offered her a job, not to mention a date.  How could she resist such generosity, not to mention such a gentleman?

Michael’s infatuation with Star led him to integrate with the Lost Boys themselves, headed by the command presence of David (Sutherland) and rounded out by Marko (Winter), Dwayne (Wirth) and Paul (McCarter).  He wasn’t let off lightly in their initiation process but was eventually accepted despite Star’s pleads and warnings.  Michael, his want for acceptance overriding Star’s pleading, accepted their hand of friendship, unaware of just what he was getting himself into.  And it wasn’t just into an odd relationship with Star.

It wasn’t long after his first encounter with the Lost Boys that Michael started to notice some changes in himself; namely his flying capabilities and want to drain Sam of blood.  It was also hard to ignore Nanook’s, Sam’s faithful Alaskan Malamute, attack while protecting Sam and Michael’s inability to cast a complete reflection.  It was doubly hard for Sam to ignore all of this, especially after all of the stupid warnings the Frog brothers gave him before.  They didn’t seem so stupid now.

Of course, all parental figures have to be dodged while the children attempt to fix things on their own which, it would seem, only made things worse.  While Michael took his relationship to the next level with Star and was desperately attempting to find some answers, Sam was sleeping with a garlic necklace and sabotaging Lucy’s dates with Max, one unintentionally but the other at the behest of the Frog brothers who were insistent that they “check out Max,” what with all of the vampire dots being connected around him.

Grandpa, meanwhile, was sitting idly by, adding a queer face to the scene but mainly keeping to his taxidermy and dates with the widow Johnson.

When the Lost Boys revealed to Michael exactly what he was, and after Star begged for help for her and Laddie, a full-force rescue operation went into effect with the Frog brothers at the helm.  While Michael, in his weakened half-vampire state, dragged Star and Laddie from the sunken lobby cave, Edgar, Alan and Sam were in the annals hunting vampires.  Needless to say they were a bit shocked when they got up-ended bat-like vampires hanging from the rafters instead of Draculas in coffins.  Unfortunately, Marko was the first casualty of the assault with a stake through his heart.  However the hunters weren’t expecting the loss of a brother to awaken the others and they were chased from the cave before anymore damage could be done.

The return to Grandpa’s house came with it an attack preparation of epic proportions.  Churches were raided for their holy water and grocery stores were cleaned out of their fresh garlic supplies.  Grandpa was shooed out of his own home with promises of a date with his beloved widow Johnson and the lockdown officially began although it didn’t last long and the Lost Boys weren’t very willing to let a few pesky locks and some wooden walls keep them away from a perfectly good act of revenge.

Paul followed Marko into the vampire afterlife first by way of a bathtub filled with garlic and holy water thanks, mostly, to Nanook.  The Frog brothers, as macho as they’d like to appear, were thoroughly useless in this situation.  However they were very willing to stake Laddie when he vamped out but Star kept the hunters at bay, pleading for his sake because he was only a child.

Dwayne was next, bested by his own need to play with his food.  Sam had a lucky shot with a bow and arrow which tacked the vampire to a hardwired stereo that jolted the creature into pieces.  Michael was left to handle the leader of the pack on his own, and David didn’t go out too easily.  After a mid-air battle between the half-vampire and his maker, Michael successfully impaled David on a set of antlers in Grandpa’s taxidermy room, thus ending his immortal life.

Lucy and Max’s date was again cut short when Lucy told Max of her suspicions, and Sam’s stories, and they rushed to her house only to find it in shambles with dead vampires and their bits everywhere.  It was only there that Max revealed himself as the head vampire, father to the Lost Boys, and told Lucy and her sons of his plans to make her his wife and have them be one big, happy family.  The blood-sucking Brady bunch, as the Frog brothers would call it.

None of them could thwart such a powerful beast and Lucy nearly succumbed to Max’s bite when Grandpa backed his truck up to save the day, filled with strategically positioned (and very large) pointed stakes that finished Max off to the detriment of the house itself.  After Grandpa took a swig of his faithful root beer, it was then that he indicated his knowledge of the vampires in the area and how he couldn’t stand all those damn vampires.  It would certainly explain his self-imposed seclusion.

*A side note – the Lost Boys would like to state that if they were the ones making the movie, they would have remained true to form instead of “supping” it up for Hollywood, as they say.  In their words, “no way in hell we’d be thwarted by a couple of zits and a vampire fetus.”  Lovely.