It's Throwback Thursday, and you know what that means! I get to review movies so old, they came out when your parents were kids! Tonight we have The Shining (1980) and The Lost Boys (1987), two horror movie classics that have withstood the test of time. Since I am also pressed for time, let's get to the reviews!
The Shining (1980) is story about a haunted hotel that a man named Jack Torrance agrees to look after over the winter, appropriately called "The Overlook Hotel." The Overlook Hotal has a long and storied history, hosting presidents and royalty, celebrities and countless others, but mostly, the hotel is just very remote. So remote, that it needs to be closed down during the winter months because getting back and forth from it is nearly impossible. Cabin fever, anyone?
I've reviewed the Shining several times, focusing on one aspect or another of it each time, so I'm not going to go into any great detail on how awesome this movie really is. It's on Netflix if you want to see it this month, and I try to watch it at least once every October. It has the best opening sequence of any horror movie I've ever seen, and it's pretty much Jack Nicholson's defining role as an actor. There's one scene I just cracked up watching earlier, the one where Jack loses his shit when Shelley Duvall's character finally realizes he's been typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." over and over, instead of writing a novel. Jack just totally mocks her, makes fun of her, and basically creeps her out so badly that she beats him with a baseball bat. Too funny. I sill feel bad when Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers) travels like 2000 miles to help Danny Torrance, and things just go so wrong so quickly. Would definitely watch again, and I've seen it about two dozen times now.
The Lost Boys (1987) is a fish-out-of-water horror story about a family that moves to a new home, and ends up encountering some shady characters. After getting dragged into a dark underworld of creepy motor-bike-riding vampires, the lead character Michael ends up becoming a half-vampire, struggling not to feed on his little brother, and to save himself at the same time. But who is the master vampire, the one whose death can free him from the eternal curse of bloodlust?
It amazes me how much different horror movies became in the short space of a mere 7 years. First you got The Shining coming out in 1980, such a reknowned piece of film-making that it's still listed as one of the scariest movies of all time (OF ALL TIME!), with it's period-pieces and typical haunted-house sort of theme, and then you got The Lost Boys coming out just 7 years later, with classic 80's music as a background soundtrack, big hair, leather jackets and bikes, punk rock and rock-star celebrities making up most of the cast. Both movies are pretty entertaining, for different reasons, and yet both are well-done examples of the horror movie genre of their time.
The Lost Boys has just about every major star of the 80's in it (seriously, it also has posters of Molly Ringwald from the Breakfast Club on the wall at some point), and pretty much made Keifer Sutherland's career. Almost everyone else in the movie has pretty much faded into obscurity (okay, maybe not Dianne Wiest), but Keifer is still almost an A-lister. The acting is good, the pacing is fun, and the effects are pretty decently done for a vampire movie. I've watched the movie a bunch of times, and it's still funny to watch everyone running around confused and stupid and with no clear idea on wtf is going on, pretty much like everyone does in real life. :-D I caught the Lost Boys on HBO2, I think, so it's best to look for it on one of the HBO channels if you want to see it this month.
One of the best things about these two movies is the use of backgrounds as story aids. In the Shining, it's all about the weather. The initial intro with the yellow Volkswagon Beetle driving up through the fall landscape lets you know that WINTER IS COMING, just like Game of Thrones, only without the capital letters. Then during the Overlook Hotel's scenes, you can almost always see snow blowing around through the windows in the background, contrasting that with Dick Halloran's vacation home in Miami, where there's lush greenery and chirping insects out his windows. In the Lost Boys, the background scenes are usually a cornucopia of images of weirdos around Santa Clara, letting you know several things at once. Not only are none of the weird hidden fringe groups of the place really going to be missed after they've become vampire food, but that a group of motorbike-riding teenaged punk-rocker vampires are just going to fit right in. Add to that the awesome sound tracks in both films, the Shining one of classic horror-movie music and the Lost Boys the beating heart of 80's rock and roll, and you end up with two very fine horror movies and classic examples of their time.
That's all for tonight, horror movie lovers! I think my throwback thursday has slipped into friday, and this old dog needs to find his bed. :-)
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