THE LOST BOYS – Even though I know I must have seen them at some point, there are some movies I can never recall ever having watched. Strangely enough for such an ‘eighties watershed’, TLB is one of those. I can only think that I first laid eyes on it back when I’d only feel positive about really extreme or obscure stuff, then pegged it as a sixth form vamp fantasy for part-time goths before throwing it in with the rest of my mental garbage. These days, after so many years, I can finally see the good in it. Although maybe that’s a bit like visiting a murderous uncle at the end of their life sentence. Anyway, I like the bits that I like – the eighties stylistics, the misfiring comedy with Corey Feldman, the clunky generation clash “stand up to yer dad, Oedipus” kinda thing, and f@ck it, even the ‘sixth form vamp fantasy for part-time goths’ angle – think I don’t have a couple of Poppy Z Brite paperbacks still lying around? There are worse ways of doing nostalgia than to revisit this.
EVIL LAUGH – As ever with these movies (by which I mean, these bad, bad movies), one person’s irredeemable dreck is another’s triumph of incompetence. ‘Evil Laugh’ is even more complicated because I’m not entirely sure whether or not it’s intended as a spoof. Parts of it are. Then there are… the other parts. It’s a slasher movie – the slasher’s gimmick is that they have an evil laugh – geddit? I think that’s genius. It’s not even that much of an evil laugh (although one guy, tied to a chair awaiting a drilling, thinks so. “You have an evil laugh,” he says as the drill inches towards his cranium. Again, genius.) I don’t have time, space or the patience to list every one of the the very many missteps made by ‘Evil Laugh’, but just about my favourite is an extended musical interlude which shows the team of slasher fodder doing house work and DIY to a catchy new wave synth tune. That might not sound like much, but in the context of a slasher flick, it’s like “wha…?” Then again, I could just as easily mention the death-by-microwave scene, or just the generally quite weird filming style, which tends to use static shots based on conspicuously posed tableaus where everyone’s been bluntly positioned to fit in the camara field so it doesn’t have to move… odd, man, odd. Again, is it the result of some arcane vision or just total bollocks? I don’t have any answers, I never do, but I can’t deny that ‘Evil Laugh’ entertains with this incessant flow of low-level strangeness. Because of the comedy angle and the fact that there are a few mentions of Friday the 13th and Fangoria magazine, many fans and commenters seem to see fit to tag it as an example of pre-‘Scream’ self-referentiality and thus some kind of suave but unheralded slice of sophisticated genre deconstruction avant la letter. I don’t think so, it’s just a (partial, probable, possible) spoof. Even back in the eighties that kind of approach to things was fairly common. I take it as I find it – merely a really odd movie that doesn’t make sense. I would love to see this done up on blu ray, in fact there must be a reason why it hasn’t happened. It’d make a nice double with that other cruddy horror comedy baffler, ‘Iced’ – there, how’s that for faint praise?
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