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?

Edward Scissorhands (1990)

“Drop your weapons!”

Finally getting to see this film, after so many years, was an interesting pop culture experience: although I’d never seen the film I distinctly recall seeing Rob Newman riffing on it in The Mary Whitehouse Experience all those many years ago. It turns out that those sketches were, well, pretty accurate, but this is nevertheless a superb and surprisingly deep film.

It’s smalltown America during some strange timeless amalgam of the 1950s and the 1980s. On the hill is a blatantly out-of-place spooky castle straight out of a Roger Corman flick, which makes the casting of Vincent Price highly appropriate. But the style, particularly Edward himself (Johnny Depp, of course, in his breakthrough role), is unmistakably Tim Burton, immune to the passing of the years. The fact that Edward always wears a gimp suit in spite of all narrative logic is the most stylistically Tim Burton thing ever, as well as partly symbolising the theme of the film: stultifying small town nosey conformity and snobbery vs. the freedom to pursue alternative lifestyles.

There’s an obvious parallel, I suppose, with the Garden of Eden (which here is a creepy horror film castle!) and the corruption of the world (which, pleasingly, is represented by 1950s conservative values), especially as Edward is shown to be a brilliant gardener, if highly unconventional. I like the dinosaur.

Edward’s “fall” is down to the corruption of this environment by means of Winona Ryder’s love interest, and the final scenes are very reminiscent of James Whale’s Frankenstein, except for the fairytale ending. Ah yes, that word “fairytale”. It keeps coming up in my reviews of Tim Burton films, doesn’t it?

There’s a nice structural trick revealed at the end (the elderly narrator is Winona Ryder), and the film is both visually brilliant and powerful in its message. Any film that has its innocent protagonist be largely based on Freddy Krueger has got to be a classic.