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Tedious rural ghost story about a Korean woman named Amanda (Sandra Oh) who lives with her home-schooled daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) on a remote farm, eschewing the modern convenience of electricity due to a claimed "allergy". But it's really due to a terrible childhood incident with her controlling mother, and now Amanda - having received her late mother's mortal remains from her uncle, finds herself convinced her "Umma"'s restless spirit is coming to claim her daughter's body for her own.
Dull supernatural thriller is clumsy, poorly-conceived and bereft of unique shocks. The acting is okay, but it's all frightfully dull.
Looks great, less filling...
-The Lost Boys (1987): 6.5/10
-Flatliners (1990): 5.5/10
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The late Joel Schumacher was often derided during his lengthy career for being a director more in love with style than substance, and...well, it's not inaccurate. Today's pair of horror thrillers are good examples, both with gorgeously glossy surfaces with little dramatic substance below them. 1987's The Lost Boys is set in Santa Carla, California, where recent divorcee Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) has relocated to with her teenage sons Sam (Corey Haim) and Michael (Jason Patric) to live with her retired, rather dotty father (Barnard Hughes). The boys are not too thrilled about the new living situation ("Where's the TV...?!"), but elder bro Michael finds himself immediately attracted to a stunning local girl, Star (Jami Gertz), whom he meets on the boardwalk, but her decadent delinquent of a boyfriend, David Powers (Kiefer Sutherland), and his pack of be-mulleted cronies (including a Bill & Ted-era "Alexander" Winter), have to put Michael through a series of initiation tests before he's allowed to become one of them. Soon, Michael sports sunglasses to protect against the glare of daylight, levitates to his bedroom's ceiling, and casts a see-through reflection in the mirror. Yep, he's become one of the near-undead, and fights against the temptation to give into his newfound bloodlust and become a vampire permanently, while the Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman, Jamison Newlander) - who run a local comic book store as cover for their real profession as vampire slayers - advise Sam on what to do to defend the family against their fanged foes.
The Lost Boys is one great-looking movie (only accentuated by its gorgeous new UHD transfer), with sumptuous cinematography by Michael Chapman that captures the sun and neon-drenched California locales with slick beauty. And the vamp makeup by Greg Cannom is superb. So then why, for all of the movie's audiovisual pleasures, does it come up short every time I watch it? Maybe it's because there's precious little time given to pesky character development. Patric and Gertz gaze at each other with ardent sizzle, yet we know virtually nothing about how she became the vampire clan's kept woman. She and Patric share a few heated glances, tumble into bed...and that's IT for their interactions within the movie. Couldn't they have shared a handful of meaningful dialogue exchanges about their respective backstories before hitting the sack? And while Sutherland is a fountain of raspy-voiced charisma as David Powers (and looks great with his demonic eyes and gnashing vampire teeth), the rest of his gang are given no individual quirks (hell, they barely have any dialogue), only acting as generic videogame ciphers to be mowed down in an action-packed climax that is admittedly full of great F/X and some fun gimmicks (like toy guns filled with holy water). Had I seen this movie between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, the shallowness of the dramatics wouldn't have bothered me at all, but I didn't get around to watching it until after the age of forty, and there's just not much nourishing blood to be sucked from the vein here. Compared to Fright Night or Near Dark, it's a distinctly anemic 80s vampire flick, with a wonderful visual style and nothing beyond that, enjoyable in fits and spurts but never as fun as you hope it will be.
1990's Flatliners features Sutherland again as Nelson Wright, an arrogant/ambitious young medical student in Philadelphia who concocts a scheme to explore what lies beyond the veil of death, volunteering to allow his heart to be stopped for one minute before being revived, hoping to bring back first-hand scientific observations of his experiences in the afterlife. He succeeds, causing his colleagues David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), Joe Hurley (Stephen Baldwin) and Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts, hot on the heels of Pretty Woman) to follow up, goading each other into longer and longer jaunts into the unknown (Oliver Platt, as Randy Steckle, only observes and frets). But soon the four "Flatliners" find themselves assailed by images of past traumas that follow them out from the dreamscape of their afterlife experiences into the real world...ones that have the ability to physically manifest themselves. Can the four resolve their past sins and find a level of redemption before being driven mad, or worse?
This is a GREAT idea for a thriller, one rife with all sorts of scientific and religious implications, but screenwriter Peter Filardi bungles this intriguing setup, and turns it into essentially a Nightmare On Elm Street sequel, only one shorn of the imaginatively surreal visual effects that made those movies (even the crummy ones) such guilty-pleasure junk food schlock. Cinematographer Jan De Bont bathes the imagery in saturated hues of blue and red to suggest the presence of supernatural forces at play (the new Arrow UHD replicates the film's widescreen visuals superbly), yet Schumacher - despite his racing, fluid camerawork - can't do much to give the ideas any real visceral kick. And the half-baked ideas don't have much consistent sense...why is Sutherland's character subjected to endless physical beatings by the young boy he did a terrible wrong to as a child (in one unintentionally funny moment, he gets loogie'd upon in dramatic slo-mo), while the other three characters only have to deal with a handful of mild guilt-ridden hallucinations? The film looks great, and composer James Newton Howard toils mightily to lend the proceedings a religioso gravity they simply do not earn, yet it's not terribly scary, and the themes of characters coming to terms with past misdeeds that haunt them lack any real emotional or dramatic kick. Sadly, even a 2017 "requel" (also featuring Sutherland) couldn't find much of interest to do with such a fascinating idea. Shame.