Lost Boys: The Tribe
“Joel Schumacher, where are you when we need you?”
Those are words that I never thought I’d find myself typing, much less even thinking. After all, Joel Schumacher directed the two worst Batman movies of all time. But that was until I saw Lost Boys: The Tribe, the new straight to DVD sequel to the eighties cult classic. Now I wish that good old Joel had stuck around.
The Lost Boys came out in 1987, and at age 13 it was one of the first horror films I saw in an actual theater, back when it was easy as pie to buy a ticket to Adventures in Babysitting and then sneak into some other R rated screening. I already had a bit of a vampire fixation, due to repeated airings of Fright Night on HBO. But Lost Boys cemented it, and I was a vampire aficionado from then on. I still remember the movie posters tagline; “Sleep All Day. Party All Night. It’s fun to be a vampire.” Hells yes, sounded good me.
The original movie is not exactly The Godfather, or even The Godfather of vampire movies, but it’s still fun as hell and really does hold up. The movie has a great look to it, a wonderful use of the Santa Cruz locations, and there really are a number of clever one liners and fun little twists to the plot. The cast is great of course, and people like Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland and Dianne Wiest went on to stardom and critical acclaim. Corey Feldman and Corey Haim went on to do coke and reality tv, and of course there’s fiesty “Grandpa” Barnard Hughes, who went on to die.
Sadly, Lost Boys: The Tribe is the epitome of a bad straight to video sequel. It brings nothing new to the table at all, and the script feels like it was written on a napkin. The producers must have thought that casting Kiefer Sutherland’s younger brother Angus as lead vampire Shane was some kind of great casting coup, but it’s a total disaster. This guy can’t act. At all. I mean, every line reading is painful in an exquisite way. Yeah, he’s good looking I guess, in that totally cheesy kind of way, but he doesn’t look enough like his brother that it creates any kind of feeling of relation to the previous movie or his brother’s performance. If you weren’t paying attention to the credits you wouldn’t even know another Sutherland was even in this flick. Then there are the two protagonists, a brother ( Tad Hilgenbrink ) and sister ( Autumn Reeser ) who move to an unknown California beach community after their parent’s unfortunate demise. Both of these actors are pretty damn awful, but lucky for them Sutherland is in this flick, and suddenly their acting seems a hundred times better.
They quickly become targets to be seduced to the dark side, but for no apparent reason other than they are both kind of hot. But don’t these vamps see hotties like this every day? Why are these two any different? At least in the original the vamps had the hidden motive of wanting to seduce the boy’s mom into the group, but there is no such plot twist here. The brother seems to have a strange, almost sexual fixation on his sister, but is that what makes them qualify for eternal life? Who knows, the script never gives us any hints.
The only person who seems to know what movie he’s in is Corey Feldman, who reprises his role as vampire hunter Edgar Frog. He’s the only actor having any fun in this movie. Sadly, the script doesn’t give him very much to work with either, and no matter how much fun it is to see Corey do an impersonation of himself at age 14, this gets tiresome too. Two other original film alums, Jamison Newlander and Corey Haim are listed in the credits, but Newlander is only in a deleted scene, and Haim makes an inexplicable cameo at the end of the movie. This scene not only contradicts the events of the original Lost Boys, but has absolutely nothing to do with the events of this movie. In fact, The Tribe contradicts several elements of the original, and I never got the sense that the writers or producers of this movie ever saw the first movie more than once. They did see plenty of other movies though, as The Big Lebowski is quoted several times, as well as The Warriors.
While I don’t have a hard time believing the director of this movie has seen those films ad nauseam, I kind of do have a hard time believing that these Bro-dude surfer/skateboarder type vamps spend their daylight hours indoors being film geeks. The waste of Newlander and Corey Haim is kind of unforgivable, as having them in it more might have given the movie enough nostalgic sentiment that we might have forgiven it for being so shitty. Plus, I would have loved to know if Corey Haim’s character of Sam still had that shirtless poster of Rob Lowe in his bedroom.
And just as a crappy gore hound movie, Lost Boys: The Tribe fails too. The body count is really, really low here. Aside from killing another vamp early on, the only real deaths are those of a group of Girls Gone Wild style tramps. In the original film, the vampires were equal opportunity killers, killing both male and female alike. Killing these girls just seemed like a way of getting some gratuitous shots of T&A in the movie. Which makes sense, as this movie really doesn’t have anything else going for it I guess. May as well throw in some boobies.
I want to say don’t bother with this movie, but the hilarious performance of Angus Sutherland makes this worth watching in a train wreck kind of way. The guy has some really laugh out loud line readings, and that alone kept me kind of entertained. But if you are one of those people who really, really loves the original movie and hold it near and dear, then please stay away. And take comfort in the fact that this was only a straight to DVD sequel, and therefore doesn’t really count. Same way that Bambi II, American Psycho 2 or Bring It On Again don’t count. OK, this movie did do one thing right; they used that cheesy song “Cry Little Sister” from the first movie. And in a very weird way, that’s what I was hoping for the most.
