All The Damn Vampires

For most adolescent boys in 1987, especially those who considered themselves to be hardened horror fans, The Lost Boys wasn't a cool movie to rally around. Even though I didn't hate it, I still felt it was my duty to refer to it condescendingly as an "MTV vampire movie." That brand of high-handed scorn hardly made an impact on The Lost Boys' reception, though, as it became a hit in the summer of '87 and remains a cult favorite to this day.

Whether it was viewed as a positive or a negative, The Lost Boys absolutely was an "MTV vampire movie," aimed squarely at the hip youth culture of the late '80s (if Hot Topic had existed then, this movie would've been a goldmine for them). At the time it was easy to dismiss The Lost Boys as slick nonsense, more of a fashion show than a horror show, but today with neither vampires or MTV being what they used to be, it's a ripe time to develop a new appreciation for director Joel Schumacher's film. Whenever the most emblematic teen films of the '80s are brought up, titles like The Breakfast Club and Say Anything always hit the top of the list but The Lost Boys is so, so '80s. I would say that all it's missing is a Tangerine Dream score but the soundtrack is pretty perfect as is - and unmistakably '80s with tracks by Echo and the Bunnyman and INXS.

Before The Lost Boys, Schumacher made one of the classic "Brat Pack" movies, St. Elmo's Fire, and like that Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, and Emilo Estevez-starring film, The Lost Boys boasted a hot young ensemble of actors. Unlike St. Elmo's, though, The Lost Boys' cast were all virtual unknowns. I can't imagine anything like that happening today - the success of a big movie being allowed to rest on a cast of no names. Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland may have had famous fathers (Jason Miller and Donald Sutherland) but neither were anywhere near being stars themselves at the time.

Back then, a movie - especially a youth-orientated one - didn't need stars. In fact, the movies were supposed to turn their neophyte casts into stars but now studios are too cautious not to stock even teen pics with already proven draws.

If studios had the mentality then that they do now, who knows what kind of misguided cast would've made their way into The Lost Boys. Instead of Sutherland as vampire ring leader David, it probably would've been '80s pop star/actor Rick Springfield (who actually did play a vampire in the 1989 TV movie Nick Knight). What a loss that would've been as Sutherland makes for one of the great cinematic vampires. I seldom notice the character appearing in fan discussions of classic vampires, maybe because it's still not fashionable to champion The Lost Boys, but Sutherland really is outstanding here.

Interestingly, while it's no mystery what David and his crew are (even the posters proclaimed "It's fun to be a vampire"), the reveal of their bloodsucking nature doesn't come until late in the movie. It's not until the one hour mark that any fangs are bared. Making the wait seem negligible, Schumacher and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, along with the cast, do a fine job of making brothers Michael and Sam Emerson's introduction to their new home in the coastal town of Santa Carla ("the Murder Capital of the World" as some graffiti on the back of a billboard ominously dubs it) engaging without having to lean on much in the way of thriller elements.

Most movies would've portrayed the character of younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) as either a Mark Petrie-esque horror fan who's immediately sensitive to what's what in Santa Carla or else as a snooping type who happens across the existence of vampires thanks to his voyeuristic habits but instead, Sam is a happy-go-lucky comic book aficionado (but not a horror fan) who finds the assertions of the young vampire hunting duo of Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) - that Santa Carla is a haven for bloodsuckers - to be risible. It's a refreshing change of pace that Sam is not the typical lonely, introverted teen lead as seen in horror movies like Phantasm.

Also flying in the face of convention is the fact that Michael (Patric) is seduced into vampirism by another male vampire. Typically (especially today in our Twilight world), either Michael or David would've been written as a girl but in The Lost Boys you've got a male bringing another male into the fold. There is a female love interest for David in the form of Jami Gertz's character of Star but she's such a wanly handled element as neither Michael or David seem particularly interested in her.

Schumacher clearly knew what he was doing and I appreciate now more than I did then how subversive it was in '87 for him to make a teen film that was so gay-themed (few would blink at it now - hell, Glee 3-D is out this weekend - but in the '80s it wasn't so readily accepted). Even without the homo-erotic tension between Michael and David, Haim's Sam would have had the gay front covered all by himself. You've got his wardrobe choices, which are, um, far more colorful than most straight teen boys would ever be comfortable with; he sings " Ain't Got No Home" by Clarence (Frogman) Henry (with what sounds like the line "I ain't got a man!" which isn't found in the original lyrics) while in the bathtub; and he has a beefcake poster of what looks like Rob Lowe in a half shirt pinned to his closet door rather than a poster of, say, The Fall Guy's Heather Thomas.

All of which is admittedly only circumstantial evidence but I don't think Schumacher is trying to be ambiguous about Sam's sexuality. Putting him in a "Born To Shop" T-shirt (rather, than, say a rock or heavy metal T-shirt) just can't be an accident and by the same token, neither is the fact that Sam is shown to be such an upbeat, angst-free kid.

As a horror film, The Lost Boys still isn't much to write home about but in the wake of Twilight, it looks almost bad-assed and its charismatic cast still charms (and not just its younger players - Barnard Hughes as Grandpa delivers one of moviedom's best last lines). The Lost Boys wasn't the movie I was looking for back in the summer of '87 but now it seems like exactly the kind of movie that summers were made for.

On a final note, no discussion of The Lost Boys would be complete without a shout-out to Jacked Up Sax Player. Seldom has such an impression been made with so little screen time.

A Myriad Of Malevolent Mirrors

Last summer's Mirrors was touted as "The Horror Event of the Summer!" but even in a summer that included competition as weak as the much-disparaged The Happening (a film I haven't seen myself yet) few felt director Alexandre Aja's film lived up to that hype. But I took an instant shine to this silly movie when I saw it in theaters last August. So much so that I included it on my top ten list for 2008. Yeah, it probably didn't belong there but damn it, I'll never stand in shame at my preference for any film - especially not in a world where some people think it isn't ridiculous to like the Saw movies. But with Mirrors now on DVD, I wanted to see how well it stood up to a second look.

Well, while I didn't discover that it had gotten any better, I did find that I still liked it just as much. Kiefer Sutherland as the lead helps a lot. As Ben Carson, an ex-cop who was forced to retire from the force after he accidentally killed someone in the line of duty and who is also dealing with a separation from his wife and children, there's ample opportunity for Sutherland to get volatile. He snaps into anger mode on a dime, and I like that. He does pissed-off better than anyone else. I could watch a whole movie of Sutherland losing his shit with people and, with Mirrors, I guess I already have. He even gets up in a nun's face, threatening her at gunpoint, and that's great stuff. Of course, all these encounters begin with Sutherland trying to be reasonable and even-tempered. But there's a short clock on that approach and as soon as a conversation turns the least bit difficult, he unleashes.

When he's not exploding in a blind rage, Ben is all alone in the torched department store where he works as a night guard. And what a place this is! When it comes to ghost stories and haunted house movies, I'm a sucker for a great location and Mirrors is a winner on that count. The set design is stellar and watching Sutherland exploring these enormous, burned-out rooms with just a flashlight crossing over ash-covered mannequins, display cases, and gigantic mirrors is totally satisfying to me. What can I say - I'm an easy customer.

And after so many PG-13 remakes of Asian horror films, I took pleasure in seeing one that went out of its way to deliver R-rated supernatural splatter - even if it wasn't in the film's best artistic interests. There's the potential for an eerie, suggestive ghost story here that Aja blindly runs roughshod over, turning Mirrors literally into a bloody mess - but that only made it more endearing to me.The already infamous death of Amy Smart's character is a hideous show-stopper, for instance, but what's especially great about it is that it makes absolutely No Sense. Of all the ways for one's mirror image to inflict death, to tear your lower jaw off (!) is - pardon the phrase - a real stretch. I took it as Aja paying fanboy tribute to the 'face-ripping' scene from Poltergeist - a scene that plays out, of course, in a mirror (with all its influences, Mirrors is a jagged collection of cinematic shards). And Mirrors' finale, in which Ben has to fight for his life against a leaping, lunging horror hag straight out of Army of Darkness, is the way more horror movies should end. Just when it looks like the movie's over - bring in a horror hag. It doesn't matter what story you've been telling up to that point, because only a jerk wouldn't want to see a horror hag. Especially one that can jump straight from the floor up to the ceiling and crawl along the side of walls.

I understand that these may not be solid grounds to praise a movie but that's fine. What we like is an inescapable reflection of who we are, even if that reflection is sometimes cracked.

Mirrors

Director Alexandre Aja's supernatural shocker Mirrors is likely to earn plenty of derisive hoots from both mainstream reviewers and the genre press. But I hope I'll have some company on the other side of the looking glass when I say that I got a really big kick out of this. If you're only going to see one bad movie about evil mirrors this year, please make it Mirrors because no one else is going to top it, believe me.

Aja first made a name for himself with his French shocker Haute Tension (2003) then successfully made the leap to the US with his remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006). Both of those movies earned their share of accolades from the horror community but neither film quite did it for me personally. Yes, the violence was spectacular - but on both counts what should've been tense, gritty, close-to-the-bone tales badly unravelled. Mirrors, on the other hand, is a crock right from the start. To me, that makes it more of a party. This is a movie that can only get more and more inane. And by God, it does.

As Mirrors unfolds, it's clear that Aja intended this to be the premiere evil mirror movie, the final word on this subject (watch your back, Poltergeist III!) and anyone who wants to take a foolish dream like that all the way to the wall deserves to have me on their side. There's not a lick of an apologetic tone here. Aja is 100% committed to making the best scary mirror movie he can. He doesn't even want to stop at mirrors - any reflective surface is a potential way for evil to find its way into our world. In hindsight, Aja probably should've reined the screenplay (co-written with his regular partner Gregory Levasseur) in a bit and done a better job of establishing a clearer set of rules for how the evil presence in his film operates. But then if he had, this movie would've been a little less cracked (heh!) than it is and that's not a trade-off I'd have been willing to see. Mirrors' story is a complete pile of nonsense, but it's an entertaining pile of nonsense. It's the warped funhouse mirror reflection of a potentially better movie. Or possibly vice-versa. With mirrors, it's so hard to tell.

Kiefer Sutherland stars as ex-NYPD detective Ben Carson, who was dropped from the force after accidentally shooting a fellow officer and who now works as a night watchman at an abandoned, fire-gutted department store (stunningly depicted by production designer Joseph Nemec's sets) while temporarily crashing on his sister's couch. In the meantime, he's trying to mend his relationship with his estranged wife (played by Paula Patton) and their two kids. So this is the worst possible time for Ben to be dealing with a supernatural force trying to push its way into our world, using him as an unwilling conduit.

Had anyone else played Ben, Mirrors might've lost a good deal of its appeal. But for those, like me, who never tire of watching Sutherland explode ("Goddammit!"), this is gold. Some will write off Sutherland's performance here as a lazy continuation of his Jack Bauer shtick but for me, even if that's all he's doing, that's cool because there's no one else around to do it. I don't know why seeing Kiefer Sutherland in pissed off mode is so enjoyable to me, it just is. Mirrors wouldn't be half as much fun without him in the way that the original Amityville Horror (1979) wouldn't have been half as much fun without James Brolin. And while Sutherland's got some horrendous dialogue to deliver here, he never seems put out or embarrassed to be saying any of the dumb things he's asked to say - and that makes him a stand-up guy in my book. Aja's lucky to have him in his corner.

Initially, Aja probably meant for Mirrors to be a Shining-esque chiller, with a more psychological brand of scares than he'd gone for previously, but apparently he couldn't help but cover his ass with some gratuitous violence, which KNB's Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger deliver in spades. This was definitely a smart move on Aja's part as Mirrors' nastier highlights leave a strong impression. And Aja also can't help but ratchet up the action in the finale, which is totally jarring but in a good way. Sutherland's final throwdown with the evil behind the mirror might blow any chance of taking this movie seriously out of the water but that shipped had already sailed. If Mirrors' climax had been a low-key affair it would've made me think that Aja didn't really know what kind of movie he was making. Thankfully he totally did and that means we get to see Sutherland do his best Bruce Campbell as he battles what looks like the pit hag from Army of Darkness (it wouldn't have been out of place at all to hear Sutherland say "This is my boomstick!"). I also liked the film's coda, which delivers a hokey but satisfying Twilight Zone-ish sting.

Supernatural horror is clearly not Aja's forte, he's more of a visceral guy (next year's Piranha 3-D is going to destroy!) but after years of seeing one PG-13 remake of a J-Horror film after another pedal the same soft scares, Mirrors (a loose remake of the 2003 South Korean film Into the Mirror) automatically earns my gratitude for telling the likes of Pulse, Shutter and One Missed Call where to shove it. This may be a silly movie, for sure, but I was thoroughly entertained by it. A reflection of my own loose standards? Maybe. But when I looked into Mirrors, I liked what I saw.