"One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach, all the damn vampires." - Grandpa
The Lost Boys took everything awesome about the 80's rolled it into one, and became a triumph of horror comedy. What sets it apart from the other 500 vampire horror comedies of the time was that it fully updated the stale and overdone stereotype, while maintaining important elements of the genre. (Near Dark did the same thing in the same year, but everyone hated it, and eventually considered it a cult film, making them look like idiots; cred.) A simple story of a widowed woman moving with her two boys into their granddad's house to start fresh, is quickly turned sinister with the revelation that they've moved to the murder capital of the world, and that a local teen-aged gang might be to blame.
But how do you make a trendy film work? Simple, you put it in a setting everyone is currently obsessed with, which was the beach at the time (and saxophones), as well as a broken family, a pet dog, weird grandpa, and a house in the middle of nowhere. You add not one, but two Coreys, both familiar with the genre, one already a veteran. You add an older brother, the poor man's Josh Brolin, in Jason Patric. And of course, you add an awesome villain in the always creepy Kiefer Sutherland. The Frog Brothers were influential in my desire to become a vampire hunter and what would be more awesome than also having a comic book shop as a cover? Nothing.
Bill S. Preston, Esquire