The Lost Boys (1987)

The Lost Boys arrives from 1987 with saxophone, motorcycle leather, and no apologies for its priorities. Two brothers, a divorced mother, a grandfather who exists to be a punchline, and a gang of vampires who refuse to grow up. The picture wants to be sexy and funny and mildly frightening, and it manages roughly two and a half of those ambitions. There is no message tucked inside the fog machine. No thesis about the social order. Kiefer Sutherland says almost nothing and takes everything anyway.

On the cultural ledger the film is close to barren. The cast is white to a person, a clean document of 1980s teen casting practice. Women exist to be worried about or pined for. Dianne Wiest's Lucy was memorably dismissed as a dopey mom by at least one reviewer, and the film does not argue with the assessment. No economic grievance, no environmental conscience, no inquiry into the body or the mind. The single faint reading available is scholarly in origin: the vampire gang's mythic male bonding has been interpreted as homoerotic subtext, an argument advanced by academics, not a design the filmmakers ever announced.

What remains is style, and the film is honest about that bargain. Ebert called it a triumph of style over substance, which now reads as a compliment of a very specific kind. Nothing here lectures. Nothing here asks the audience to reconsider its own arrangements. A picture can be hollow and still hum, and this one hums along on hair gel, a cave full of mischief, and a saxophone player who believes in his work.