This past week, I rewatched Iron Eagle to give it the full Retro Review treatment, and it was like being slapped in the face by the 80s. Hard. While the 80s were still ringing in my ears, I found myself focusing on pure, distilled 80s. 100% proof 80s.
Something so 80s that it makes me wistful for Cold War uncertainty and cellphones the size of briefcases. A kind of 80s singularity from which nothing can escape. Outposters, it is time to go back. Way back. To The Lost Boys.
Fangs, Fashion, and Feathered Hair
What the actual fuck were we doing in the 80s? Everything was so awesome, but we had no idea that we were close to the peak of humanity at that time.
We were just too busy being cool, and in 1987, being cool meant you could ride a motorbike while wearing sunglasses at night, own a trench coat that looked like it ate a sheepdog, and dance unironically to saxophone solos performed by men so shiny you could fry eggs on their pecs.
Which is why this was simply the coolest movie in the known universe for one, brief, glorious moment in our lives. Welcome to The Lost Boys, Joel Schumacher’s teenage vampire opus that asks – What if Peter Pan’s Lost Boys grew up, bought motorcycles, and joined a Bon Jovi tribute band?
And the answer, apparently, is that it would be amazing and also smell strongly of Drakkar Noir.
So welcome to Santa Carla, Murder Capital of the World. We are introduced to it via a sweeping helicopter shot over a California boardwalk straight out of a Pepsi commercial. There’s cotton candy, there’s neon, there’s a merry-go-round playing a cover of People Are Strange by the Doors. See, it’s all so fucking cool even right at the start.
Brothers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) arrive in town with their newly divorced mom, Lucy, played by the eternal sensible mom of 80s cinema, Dianne Wiest. They’re moving in with Grandpa, a taxidermy-obsessed old man who looks like he’s been waiting 40 years to star in a movie where he gets to drive a jeep and make cryptic jokes about vampires.
There are only two rules in Santa Carla, apparently. First, everyone is too cool for curfews. Second, every parent is conveniently busy whenever supernatural carnage happens.
Lucy? Working late. Grandpa? Taxidermying raccoons. The police? Nowhere to be seen.
Against this backdrop, they have the most 80s family dynamic imaginable: a loving but distracted mom, a wise-cracking nerd brother, and an older sibling hanging with a bad crowd that looks like the house band at a Motley Crüe funeral.
It is like somebody in the costume design department was handed a Sears catalogue, a can of cooking spray, and a photo of Bon Jovi and was told:
“You… go make it fashion!”
As a result, the vampires dress like they were excommunicated from a Mad Max cosplay club, with three layers of leather, fingerless gloves, and trench coats that would make a Matrix fan go weak at the knees.
This is before we even get to hair so luxurious that low-flying aircraft have to divert around it.
Even the “normal” kids look like they’re auditioning for a vaguely gothic version of a John Hughes movie.
Kiefer Sutherland (David, the vampire leader) sports a peroxide-blond mullet that defies logic and gravity. Jason Patric’s Michael wears his coat indoors because apparently nothing says “teen angst” like dressing like an extra from a local amateur dramatic society presentation of Blade Runner.
Let’s not forget the earrings – dear lord, the earrings! This shit, right here, is why people were pointing and laughing at American notions of “cool” in the 1980s.
The Oiled-Up Saxophone
This all reaches some kind of weird, fully homoerotic zenith as we are introduced to the man, the myth, the slippery legend that is straight out of some kind of MTV fever dream – Tim Cappello.
Why hasn’t he got a shirt on? Why is he wearing spandex pants? Why is he slicker than a mishap on a BP oil rig? The movie simply doesn’t bother to stop to ask, so neither should we.
He belts out I Still Believe like his life depends on it, gyrating under the moonlight, in the most unintentionally hilarious thing ever put on film that doesn’t feature somebody falling over.
The internet didn’t exist back then, but if it did, his performance would’ve broken it. Every GIF, every meme, every forum post would just be Tim, shimmering like Apollo after a spin class.
Joel Schumacher reportedly said he wanted that scene to capture “the energy of the boardwalk.” Mission accomplished, and all it took was a coconut oil budget that seemingly topped the cocaine budget.
The rest of the soundtrack is similarly legendary. We get Echo & The Bunnymen covering The Doors, INXS teaming with Jimmy Barnes, and Gerard McMann’s Cry Little Sister – a song so haunting it should come with its own eyeliner.
This isn’t just background music. This soundtrack is the movie. If you bought the album on cassette, you were legally required to listen to it wearing a trench coat and staring moodily into the distance. Extra points if you used a wind machine.
Joel Schumacher never hid who he was – flamboyant, visual, and unapologetically stylish – and it is all on display here. The Lost Boys isn’t “gay cinema,” but it’s definitely got a camp sensibility that says:
“We’re going to make vampires 80s sexy and we’re not sorry.”
What you actually get is one of the most equal-opportunity movies ever. The male gaze? Everyone looks hot. Everyone is objectified – dudes, chicks, vampires, saxophonists – the camera lingers lovingly on Jason Patric’s jawline like it’s a National Geographic special on endangered chins.
Schumacher once joked that he cast people he “wanted to look at for months.” It shows. Every frame drips with some kind of erotic tension, from the gang initiation scene to the shirtless cave sleepovers, so you imagine Schumacher was loving it.
Parents? What Parents?
As we touched on in the Iron Eagle review, 80s American movie parents are required to fulfill some clear duties in these types of movies:
-Deliver one line of advice
-Be oblivious to what their kids are really up to
-Drive a station wagon
-Then vanish until Act Three
Mission accomplished, then. Mom Lucy is caring, relatable, and about as aware of what’s happening as a goldfish watching The Shining.
Grandpa fares slightly better as he’s the only one who knows what’s going on, but omits to tell anyone because apparently communication wasn’t invented until the 1990s.
The result? Santa Carla becomes a playground for unsupervised teens who look 27 so they can fight vampires on dirt bikes.
The Original Script was meant to be about child vampires more The Goonies than vaguely gay gothic. Schumacher said:
“No thanks, I want sexy teens in leather.”
This sounds so wrong when you put it like that, but this is a decision that movie historians must now rank as 100% correct, as the movie is considered a classic of the era.
To think, Jason Patric nearly turned down the role because he thought vampires were silly. This is the man who would also star in Solar Babies in this decade.
Corey Haim’s wardrobe remains basically a cry for help from the decade, with mismatched shirts, technicolor trench coats, and patterns so loud they could summon Cyndi Lauper.
This all combines to make The Lost Boys a rare 80s film that manages to be both a parody of its own era and a masterpiece of it. It’s stylish, funny, scary(ish), and infinitely rewatchable.
Yes, it’s camp, everyone’s over-styled, and the sax guy is over-oiled, but it’s also the film that made vampires cool again decades after Christopher Lee had hung up his cape.
Without The Lost Boys, there’s no Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no Blade, maybe even no Twilight – though we’ll try not to hold that against it.
Final Score
This one needs a highly specialist scoring system. Stars just ain’t gonna cut it.
Fashion Crimes: 5/5 – You can hear the leather creak just by thinking about this movie.
Hair Volume: 6/5 – Physics filed a complaint.
Parental Involvement: 0/5
Soundtrack Power: 10/5 – You still have it on tape somewhere and you know it!
Oily Saxophone: Immortality.
