1987 horror comedy, dir. Joel Schumacher, Jason Patric, Corey Haim:
IMDb /
allmovie. You're a creature
of the night, Michael. You wait 'till mom finds out!
I knew someone who had the soundtrack from this film and played
it a lot. (Also the 1989 Batman.) This makes it sound
nostalgically familiar, in a way the rest of the film isn't, since I
didn't see it at the time.
It does seem to have been a confluence of young actors who had done or
went on to other, bigger things: Jason Patric's second film, the
Coreys Haim and Feldman, and even Alex Winter as one of the background
vampires (two years later he'd play Bill in Bill and Ted's Excellent
Adventure). The women (both of them) don't come off as well; Dianne
Wiest was already being typecast in the sort of thankless background
mom role that she has here, and Jami Gertz' career high point after
this was probably as the ex-wife in Twister.
An awful lot of this is standard Eighties children's film. Mom is
bringing up the family without Dad (divorced, in this case; some films
kill him off instead, but the universal constant is that he isn't
going to be part of the story even in an emergency). They've just
moved to a small town and the kids have to make new friends. One of
them gets involved with the Bad Kids. And maybe there's a new romance
for Mom on this horizon?
Part of the problem with the film, I think, is that it tries to do too
much. We've got Michael being seduced into the bad kid lifestyle
(which is almost incidentally vampiric, but mostly it's about staying
out all night and nuke yer parents); we've got younger brother Sam
worrying about him; we've got the pathetic monster hunter kids Edgar
and Alan Frog, being played purely for comic relief in a way that I
just find embarrassing; and we've got mom's romance with Max the video
store owner. Each of these threads gets a basically superficial
treatment, and we keep switching from one to another so there's never
much chance to build narrative momentum.
So is it a kids' drama like Stand By Me (Sam and the Frogs), or an
brooding sexy adolescent drama like The Breakfast Club (Michael and
the vampires)? It's both! Mood whiplash, what's that?
I got to the end and realised that Grandpa could have dealt with the
problem at any time, but he didn't, because then there wouldn't have
been a film. At the very least he might have checked whether the kids
were baptised, and got one of those dodgy non-consensual churches to
do it if they weren't. (Also Hot Vampire Girl is de-vamped because
heaven forbid Michael might actually have to make a hard choice.)
Ah well. It's not exactly offensive, unless you demand more than it's
willing to give; it's meant to be forgettable popcorn, and I suppose
it does that well enough.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.