THE LOST BOYS

Warner Bros. follows up on last year's DVD release of this title with this two-disc special edition, which ought to be everything you'd ever want in a LOST BOYS DVD. Both a commercial and critical success on its release in 1987, the film has gone on to become a powerful cult item, fitting in with both horror fans and those that follow '80s teen movies equally well.

Newly divorced Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) moves from Phoenix to the California coast town of Santa Carla (Santa Clara, renamed when the town council got a look at the script) to live with her eccentric father (Barnard Hughes), taking with her two sons. Stepping out that evening to explore their unusual new community, all three have adventures on the seaside boardwalk. Lucy finds both a job and a potential new boyfriend in video store owner Max (Edward Hermann, the '90s Herman Munster, now best known as the patriarch of THE GILMORE GIRLS). Tween son Sam (Corey Haim) meets up with odd brothers Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), who profess to be monster hunters when they're not working in their (apparently catatonic) parents' comic-book store.

But teen son Michael (Jason Patric) has the most intense experience, which comes to involve the entire family. Following young beauty Star (Jami Gertz), Michael falls in with a bad crowd. A very bad crowd. At first, it seems like David (Kiefer Sutherland) and his gang are the usual biker bunch, battling surf punks and looking for kicks. But it slowly becomes apparent that beneath their rock star clothes, these Lost Boys hide a sinister secret. It turns out that the Frog Brothers aren't imagining things Santa Carla is home to a nest of vampires, and Michael's entire family is in danger of being drawn into their evil web.

The finished film is the result of a fortuitous combination of talents. Director Joel Schumacher had yet to derail the Batman franchise with camp, but was buoyed by a cult following from his Brat Pack drama ST. ELMO'S FIRE. The original script was a juvenile horror comedy, sort of a vampire version of THE GOONIES, that Richard Donner had been working on for some time. But Schumacher and writer Jeffrey Boam (THE DEAD ZONE) gave it a more adult spin by making the Lost Boys teenagers, contrasting darkness with more comedy. From there, he assembled a wonderful cast and crew, gave the project a specific look and sensibility, and combined the strong visuals with a spot-on perfect rock soundtrack. For all these reasons and more, THE LOST BOYS is a movie that lots of different people love. It helped define the modern interpretation of vampires, which has since been expanded on by Anne Rice, Joss Whedon and others. It has endured timelessly through the past 17 years, and looks to picking up new fans with every generation.

Warner's new transfer of the film is a bit dark and contrasty in places, better reflecting its theatrical release than the now more familiar video version, but the widescreen compositions are much more satisfying than the cropped picture seen on tape. Joel Schumacher's commentrak is hit & miss he gives ample credit to his strong cast contributions, tells us why some footage runs backwards, and gives a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes information. However, he also falls silent now and then, gets some of his vampire history wrong, and fails to tell us how the vampire kiddie movie became THE LOST BOYS. He also emphasizes how difficult it was to explain to Warner brass the cross-genre concept of a horror comedy. Couldn't he have simply pointed to FRIGHT NIGHT or GHOSTBUSTERS for reference?

Schumacher does a better job on disc two's 24-minute documentary retrospective, as well as several other featurettes, explaining more about how he came to the project, his casting choices, and more. Producer Richard Donner and some of the cast contribute stories as well, interspersed with clips from the film. Feldman gives us a great quip, describing vampires as "dead with bonuses". One featurette discusses various plans for sequels that have cropped up over the years. And who knows? Maybe some of these ideas will be picked up one day. Then we can find out if some of Santa Carla's civic leaders really are zombies and werewolves, too.

15 minutes of deleted scenes would've re-emphasized the family's closeness, given us a look at Michael's job, and other interesting but extraneous material. Did you know that Lannie isn't Star's brother? A map menu leads to narrated illustrations detailing the vampire legends of many lands an extra that would fit in with any vampire DVD. While it might seem natural for many cultures to develop folklore about reanimated corpses, other worldwide similarities such as drinking blood and aversion to garlic are more difficult to explain.

There's a photo slideshow which give a better look at many of the shots used in the documentaries, mainly focusing on Greg Cannom's makeup f/x, and an unintentionally amusing music video by Lou Gramm, but for many a highlight will be a whole section devoted to Haim and Feldman, two child actors with the same first name who were first teamed on this film and became close friends and frequent costars. Both Coreys and Jamison Newlander participated in the featurette interviews, so the producers have come up with the fun idea of having all three speak separately on camera while watching some of their scenes together. Fun, but it might've been more fun to bring all three actors together for a full length audio commentrak where they could play off each other.