Starring: Jason Patric, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest, Barnard Hughes, Edward Herrmann Directed By: Joel Schumacher Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC Label: Warner Home Video Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: January 28, 1998 Running Time: 97 minutes Theatrical Release Date: July 31, 1987
Description: Strange events threaten an entire family when two brothers move with their divorced mother to a California town where the local teenage gang turns out to be a pack of vampires.
DVD Features: Production Notes Theatrical Trailer
Amazon.com: This 1987 thriller was a predictable hit with the teen audience it worked overtime to attract. Like most of director Joel Schumacher's films, it's conspicuously designed to push the right marketing and demographic buttons, and granted, there's some pretty cool stuff going on here and there. Take Kiefer Sutherland, for instance. In Stand by Me he played a memorable bully, but here he goes one step further as a memorable bully vampire who leads a tribe of teenage vampires on their nocturnal spree of bloodsucking havoc. Jason Patric plays the new guy in town, who quickly attracts a lovely girlfriend (Jami Gertz), only to find that she might be recruiting him into the vampire fold. The movie gets sillier as it goes along, and resorts to a routine action-movie showdown, but it's a visual knockout (featuring great cinematography by Michael Chapman) and boasts a cast that's eminently able (pardon the pun) to sink their teeth into the best parts of an uneven screenplay. --Jeff Shannon
A Satisfying Horror-Fantasy Flick (Rating: 3.5 of 5) Far from being a perfect film, or even great for that matter, it is none the less a movie that will live on. As with anything, time can be very revealing. But things that seem pretentious and awkward now, were felt wholly different circa '87. But that happens with any film as it dates, and that is not the reason why I give it a 3.5 rather than a 4 or 4.5 (on to that later).
Whatever its faults, this film has a lot going for it, including a stellar cast. This film, as you should know, set off the careers of many talented people. As good a director Joel is, there was certainly potential to screw this one up bad, had Jason Patric or even Kiefer Sutherland been miscast (or not cast).
More on the positive, is the sheer atmosphere of this film. We CAN certainly thank Joel for his awesome direction there. Because, really, anything is tolerable with great visuals and tonality. Also, typically, it is very tough to cross-genre in a movie like this. It has been done before, but rarely to this amount of success. This film flips back and forth suitably between drama, horror, adult-romance and slap stick. Thank Joel and the cast equally.
My quibble is that this film tends to feel too rushed near the end. I read somewhere that they didn't have a lot of time, but even so. Laying it all on so thick at the end, for me, made it feel ham-fisted. It is ham-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. I guess I could've done with a little less slap-stick, so to speak. But, whatever...
This is still a groundbreaking film for its time. There was very little of that kind of imagery going on pre-Lost era '87. Visually this film is intense.
I liked it. I recommend it.
Love this movie! I've loved this movie since I was a teenager, and watching it again as an adult, it is still a great movie!
Essential viewing for vampire fans The Lost Boys stands out as one of the finest examples of an 80's teen horror/comedy movie themed around vampires that this reviewer has seen, (amazingly other movies that fall into that category actually exist!). While it ocassionally treads into some rather corny territory as far as the humor goes, it still maintains enough seriousness to go down as a solid vampire movie.
In short, a mother and her two sons, Sam and Michael, move to the town of Santa Carla, the "murder capital of the world". When the two brothers decide to explore town, Michael falls into a bad crowd of kids. By "bad" I don't mean that they do drugs and vandalize city property, by "bad" I mean that they are really vampires and every night they go out and kill people to satisfy their blood thirst. Once they convert Michael into one of their own, his younger brother Sam embarks on a mission to save his brother's soul along with the help of two goofy self-proclaimed vampire hunters that work in a comic book shop.
One thing I'll say about The Lost Boys is that if it didn't star Feldman and Haim, I'd have never guessed this was from 1987. This movie has aged magnificently as there is hardly a shred of evidence to indicate that it's over twenty years old, I'd have guessed it was from the mid ninety's perhaps. Looking at The Lost Boys from a horror/comedy standpoint, it is neither scary nor laugh out loud funny. However with its mix of darker subject material and light hearted humor, it is indeed a very fun movie to watch and the replay value is high. If you love vampires and/or horror movies, consider The Lost Boys essential viewing. Thanks for reading!
Blu review only... I have had the most difficult time in rating this release fairly. I live here in Santa Cruz County and this film is a time capsule for the area, but I was watching this to check the Blu transfer, which unfortunately was limited to original quality shortcomings.
The special features are all similar to the 2-disc set, and the sound was not mixed to anything new (sounded worse in some parts). The positive though is the clarity improvements for the backgrounds and recognizing all the extras. I did the usual pause stops in about 30 places and nearly every frame looked average to poor (for Blu); the night shots were universally grainy and even had foreign material still grained in. BUT - one great exception was the helicopter shots - they must have used a different camera as each aerial Boardwalk shot is screen save quality. I paused just after the main title and was easily able to pick out everything you could not on the standard DVD. Was able to recognize several of the people on the roller coaster shots now when I could not on the DVD. So there are some nice improvements, but in being fair to all of the other BDs I have seen and what quality exists, this is not a mainstream purchase recommendation.
It is almost mandatory ownership for the locals though. Once you see the deleted scenes and opening credits of the main docu, you can see the improvement over the original film stock. Between this and Sudden Impact, at least the aerial shots will always be preserved in how West Cliff and the coastline used to look.
Lost Boys hi-def is outstanding Being a huge fan of the original (DVD), I couldn't wait to get my hands on the blu-ray release... and I wasn't disappointed.
Some of the close up or darker scenes show a little graininess, but overall the movie is gorgeous looking. And the audio soundtrack (which fans of the movie will appreciate) has received the sounds tweak that blu-ray movies are becoming accustomed to - it sounds spectacular.
Old school fans of the movie will be in for a treat with this blu-ray feature - awesome movie.
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