I thought I'd post my 2004 review of Near Dark, which came in an email to JPX and JSP after I wrote the reviews at work. Since these two reviews came in one package, I'm reprinting them both.85. Lost Boys (1987) ***
My roommate has a synopsis of this movie from the TV section of Entertainment Weekly pinned to the fridge: "Vampires chase everyone named Corey."
This is the movie that immortalized the words "My own brother, a shit-sucking vampire! Wait until Mom finds out, buddy!" and planted its own flag in the ever-crowding hill of modern vampire movies. Universal movie mom Diane Weist and her two sons move in with Grandpa in the vampire-infested beach town of Santa Carla. One son gets recruited by the vamps, the other son gathers two allies and starts the fight.
This movie has some stuff going for it. There's some original applications of the age-old vampire rules. Yeah, why not fill a water pistol with holy water? That just makes sense. Keifer Sutherland pulls off a decent villain here, too, there's a good deepness to his voice I hadn't really noticed before. There are some perks on the soundtrack. Also, I absolutely love the last line of the movie. Here and there are a couple of other moments that still ring true, but what does this movie not have going for it? Quite a bit.
First of all, Lost Boys has the incredible disadvantage of being one of the definitive bastions of late 80's cool. Uh-oh. I'd hope we all know by now how I feel about the late 80's. (Love the early 80's, of course.) You've got the bizarre showcasing of Corey Haim, not knowing that the ride will ever end. Watch as preteen girls get excited about Corey...taking a bubble bath! Or looking at the sexy Rob Lowe poster on his wall (I'm not kidding, it's there). We have the antics of the other Corey and his onscreen brother -- while sometimes still funny, it turns out they get more annoying with time. And then there's the vampires, whose main recruiting promise is that you can rev your motorcycles in the dark and go "woo hoo!" and stuff. This time around I didn't find the vampires flying like Superman really to be all that interesting, and the bulk of the scares are based on those flying POV shots, so...
I don't think I realized this was directed by Joel Shumacher until this viewing, but I wasn't surprised. The sets and costumes reminded me a lot of the unfortunate set design of the back alleys of Shumacher's Gotham City. Everything is all cluttered, the vampires' lair is a fathomless collection of posters, drapes, hanging chandelier things, candles. The costumes on the hench-vamps are complicated collections of colored jackets and shirts and scarves. A lame design sense I don't miss.
It's not like this movie is unwatchable now, but so much of what made it fun feels extremely diluted. Good performances, and enough action to propel it forward, but it'll be a few years before I think about checking this out again.
87. Near Dark (1987) ****Ah, here we go. A vampire movie that came out the exact same year that still has staying power. Also director Kathryn Bigelow's best movie, in my opinion. Caleb is a young cowpunk who's got nothing to do because he lives in Oklahoma. He meets a pretty girl one night who nips him on the neck, and soon finds himself unwillingly hooked in to a roving gang of Western vampires, led by the always-eerie Lance Henriksen. Unlike Lost Boys, all the vampires in Near Dark have personalities. They've also got a nasty, dirty look to them, both from the dust of the road and the leftover soot from catching bits of sunlight.
This movie doesn't bother with any of the vampire rules except drinking blood, never dying, and avoiding sunlight. And they do some great stuff with the sunlight, like when Caleb is walking home in the sun just after getting bit and there's all this smoke coming off of him, or when Bill Paxton blows a shotgun hole through a door (and the cop outside) and then the sunlight comes through the hole and slams him across the room. Like any good western, there's a lot of gunplay.
The key to this movie is mood. The stylish direction and Tangerine Dream soundtrack never stop delivering the agoraphobia of the open West, or the nightblue strangeness of being a vampire out in the big country. So many movies will lack this completely, or flub the attempt (Shumacher's mood bits in LB involve a lot of dreamy crossfades and come off very Hallmark).
I'm a little dubious of the plot point about reversing vampirism, but I'll certainly let it go for this yummy gem of a movie.
