The Awkward Movie Challenge: The Lost Boys
Mike:
Apparently, our extended break from the Awkward Movie Challenge has affected Jeffrey’s brain more profoundly than he realizes. I have not had a baby. I just wanted to clarify that in the event my mom reads this blog. That’s a joke. Not the baby part. I really haven’t made one of those. The joke is the idea that my mom knows what a blog is. She doesn’t.
Truer to form is Jeffrey’s fixation on the gay subtexts of The Lost Boys. If there’s one thing that gets that guy worked up, it’s gay subtexts. You should have heard him when Lord of the Rings came out. Yeesh.
Hey, Dinsmore, suck on these!
But at least the film’s homoeroticism–which it has in spades–is something to talk about. And these elements are actually quite self-aware, considering that Joel Schumacher is openly gay. The director must have been having a good giggle behind the backs of all the hetero-horror nuts who turned his film into a cult favorite. Of course, shots of sax-blowing musclemen with oily mullets and posters of Rob Lowe’s midriff aren’t exactly urbane wit worthy of James Whale. But I may just be splitting hairs.
'Lost Boys' don't do witty homoeroticism like 'Bride of Frankenstein' do witty homoeroticism.
But now I’m off on a homoerotic tangent too. That’s probably because I don’t have much to say about The Lost Boys, which is otherwise kind of sucky— entertainingly sucky, but sucky nonetheless. If I had spent my teen years grooving to Echo and the Bunnymen’s version of “People are Strange” as Jeffrey did, I might have more affection for it. I didn’t, so I can really only enjoy it as a good-bad movie, with its atrocious music video aesthetics and grotesque hairstyles. Jeffrey suggests that it’s unfair to focus on such dated aspects, but without this stuff, we’re not left with much other than a so-so movie about vampire teens in which Corey Feldman tries to force puberty’s onset by growling like Tom Waits. The Lost Boys is basically a helium balloon anchored by ridiculous ‘80s fashions: yank out the fashions and the film floats away. If it wasn’t for the hair and the clothes and the sax-blowing musclemen, The Lost Boys would be a lot less entertaining, and I’d have absolutely nothing to say about it.
Mike gives The Lost Boys…. four and a fourth Frodos!
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I need to rewatch Lost Boys. I think I probably watched it with Jeffrey many of those times, late at night, all alone. But it was the 80s, so there was nothing homoerotic about that.
1I really thought it held up. Maybe not an amazing film in the history of amazing horror movies, but I thought it moved quickly, the special effects held up, and the dialogue was much smarter than it had any right to be.
2I still use "Cry Little Sister" as my little sister's ringtone on my phone, and put off answering sometimes to hear more of the song.
I will definitely watch it again to see how it holds up. Then I'll watch Lost Boys 2 to lose any love I have left for the franchise.
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