The Lost Boys (1987)

 "Read the TV guide, you don't need a TV!"

I know: where have I been all these years, ten years old in 1987 yet the first time I saw The Lost Boys was last night. At least I've seen it now,

As a story... the film is good. I wouldn't use a stronger word than "good": this is a fairly bog standard Hollywood blockbuster plot, but it's done well enough. And, given the youth of much of the cast, it's well performed. Dianne Wiest particularly excels as the sweet, overstressed Lucy, a character who feels very real, And Barnard Hughes is superb as Grandpa, Greek chorus and by far the coolest character in spite of all the very cool youth culture stuff.

And there's a lot of the latter. The main theme song is a banger in its own right: yes, Marilyn Manson's cover is better- his covers invariably are- but we don't talk about him nowadays. We get Echo and the Bunnymen covering People Are Strange. The vampires live in an abandoned underground hotel with a massive poster of Jim Morrison on the wall. All this stuff has a lot to do with why this film became such a cult classic, I feel.

And yet, I think, despite the rather satisfying resolution, the film is raised above its good-but-not-great script by its visuals. It has a very late '80s goth aesthetic. The vampires and the scenes surrounding them look great. And you can never go wrong with showing amusement rides at night to evoke a sense of the eerie.

A film with a merely decent script, then, but one elevated above that by visuals and coolness. And this is also a fascinating glimpse of vampires in pop culture in the '80s- a possible influence on both Anne Rice and Joss Whedon?

The Goonies (1985)

"Nothing exciting ever happens here anyway..."

I was eight in 1985. And this is the first time I've ever seen this film. Yes, I know.

So, what’s it like, seeing this for the first time at the age of forty-two? Well, I rather enjoyed it, and not least because of the bizarreness of seeing Sam from Lord of the Rings and Thanos as brothers. It’s a pirate themed adventure story-cum-comedy, complete with comedy criminal baddies, scripted but not shot by Steven Spielberg and seemingly intended as very much Indiana Jones (a hot property in 1985) for kids- even to the point of casting Ke Huy Quan.

There are lots of booby traps, Heath Robinson style escapades and silly gadgets, mostly from Data, and even the opening of the gate early on is the coolest thing ever. It’s essentially for kids and I’m really probably too old to appreciate it, but there’s also a little bit of subtle romance wiry the teenage Josh Brolin and a splendid comeuppance for some evil property developers.

Maybe there’s an uncomfortable focus on Chunk’s Jewishness but, then again, the part is both written and played by a Jewish person. And the character of Sloth is probably not one we’d see these days.But this is a pretty much faultless ‘80s classic that I really, really should have seen back in the day when I used to constantly see the poster reproduced here in the pages of the UK reprint of Secret Wars II. Lessons learned, I think, and better thirty-four years late than never...

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

"What happens if a psycho wanders in?"

Sigh. That was boring. It may have had a slightly more famous cast than usual, with Corey Feldman and the always bizarre sight of a hound Crispin Glover not playing George McFly, and have been helmed by Chuck Norris’ favourite director to boot, but this dragged more than any other film in the franchise.

Oh, it starts well, with Jason apparently dead until he comes to life for no apparent reason, and the first deaths are rather amusing. But then the rest of the film goes on to spend too much time following some rather dull teenagers with their romantic escapades punctuated with a series of random deaths which are gory, yes, but have no build-up, no tension. The film isn’t even trying to be scary, and comes across like a half-arsed romantic comedy for far too long. The gory killings, many of them visually impressive, are brief and followed by cuts to more teenage japery.

For the fourth film in the series- with a massive “previously on”- thus offers nothing different to the format except for not even trying to be scary. And I have no idea what they’re trying to do with little Tommy at the end- set him up as another killer? Disappointing, and not helping with my determination to finish them all.