Plot
Michael Emerson (Jason Patric) and his younger brother, Sam (Corey Haim), move with their recently divorced mother, Lucy (Dianne Wiest), to the beach community of Santa Carla, California. The family moves in with Lucy's father (Barnard Hughes), a cantankerous and eccentric old man who lives on the outskirts of town, and enjoys taxidermy as a hobby.
Michael and Sam begin hanging out on the Boardwalk, which is plastered with flyers of missing people. While Lucy gets a job at a local video store run by a conservative man named Max (Edward Herrmann), Michael becomes fascinated by Star (Jami Gertz), a beautiful young woman he spots at the Boardwalk one night, and who lives with David (Kiefer Sutherland), the mysterious leader of a local gang. Meanwhile, in the local comic book store, Sam meets brothers Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), a pair of self-proclaimed vampire hunters, who warn him that Santa Clara is under attack from vampires, and give him horror comics to teach him about the threat.
Michael finally talks to Star, and is approached by David, who goads Michael into following them by motorcycle down the beach until they reach a dangerous cliff (which Michael almost goes over). At the gang's headquarters, a sunken luxury hotel beneath the cliff, David initiates Michael into the group, having him drink from a bottle of wine. Star warns Michael not to drink, telling him it is blood, but Michael ignores her advice after being tricked into thinking noodles and rice are worms and maggots.
The next day, Michael develops a thirst for blood and impulsively attacks an unknowing Sam who is bathing. Nanook (Sam's Alaskan Husky) attacks Michael, pushing him away from Sam and leaving him with a bad bite mark on his hand. After Michael retreats to his room he starts demonstrating supernatural powers. Michael then realizes he is turning into a vampire and asks Sam for help. From comic books, Sam discovers that since Michael has not killed anyone he is still a "half-vampire" and his condition can be reversed upon the death of the "head vampire". The next day, Sam and the Frog brothers become convinced that Max is the head vampire and subject him to a series of tests while he is on a date with Lucy at their home. However, he passes the tests, seemingly indicating that he is human.
Determined to tempt Michael in to making his first kill, David takes him one night to a bonfire where a group of Surf Nazis are gathered, and he and the rest of the gang enter a vicious feeding frenzy. Horrified by the sight, but knowing that he cannot hold off his vampire instincts for much longer, Michael returns home to Sam, who asks him who the head vampire is. Star then suddenly arrives, flying in through the window, and revealing that she too is a half-vampire. Michael realizes that the wine he drank on his first night in the gang's lair was in fact David's blood. It emerges that David had intended for Michael to be Star's first kill, sealing her fate as a vampire. Star, however, says that she too wants to be cured.
The next day, a weakening Michael leads Sam and the Frog brothers to the gang's lair, where they intend to kill the vampires in their sleep. (The Frog Brothers are stunned and terrified to discover that the vampires do not sleep in coffins, but hang from the ceiling like roosting bats.) The staking of one vampire (Marko) awakens David and the two others, and the boys barely escape with their lives, but manage to rescue Star and Laddie, a recently abducted half-vampire child.
That evening, while Lucy is on a date with Max, and Grandpa is out of the house, the teens arm themselves with weapons based on traditional defenses against vampires. David and the gang attack, and are each killed in a spectacular fashion. Michael faces off with David, and ultimately impales him on a pair of mounted deer antlers. However, Michael, Star and Laddie do not transform back to normal with David's death, as they had hoped. Lucy and Max then return home, and Max is revealed to be the head vampire after all. He informs the boys that to invite a vampire into one's house (as Michael sarcastically invited Max in for Lucy's dinner date,) renders one powerless, which explains why Sam and the Frog brothers' tests failed to work on him. Max's objective all along was to get Lucy to be a "mother" for his "lost boys". But his grand plan is thwarted when Grandpa suddenly crashes his jeep through the wall of the house, impaling Max on the wooden fence posts he is carrying in the back of the jeep, and causing him to explode in the fireplace. Michael, Star, and Laddie then return to normal.
The film ends with Grandpa calmly and casually retrieving a drink from the fridge, seemingly oblivious to the carnage around him. He then declares, "One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach...all the damn vampires", revealing that he has known about the vampires all along. Michael and Sam look at each other in disbelief.
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