Lost Boys: The Tribe

D+

by Tasha Robinson August 12, 2008

Publisher:
- Warner Bros.
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Joel Schumacher's 1987 horror-comedy The Lost Boys became a cult phenomenon via a zeitgeist-conscious blend of dark comedy, MTV glam, and erotic gothic brooding. It hit in the moment before emo became a pop punchline and vampires slunk and postured their way into every possible genre and medium. The cultural landscape has changed considerably since then, but the belated direct-to-DVD sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe never tries to find a similar anchor in current trends. Instead, it offers up low-rent mimicry of the first Lost Boys, with cheaper actors, cinematography, effects, and music. Then it compensates with copious gore and bare tits. Granted, there's an audience for boobs and blood no matter what the era, but this halfhearted package offers little else.

In a plot familiar from the first film, a pair of pretty siblings move to a California beach town, where they're semi-supported by a cantankerous older relative and targeted by a pack of sexy vampires. This time, the younger sibling (Autumn Reeser) is female, and the older one (Tad Hilgenbrink) is creepily overprotective, to the point of abandoning a partner, mid-fuck, to go check on her. When broody head vamp Angus Sutherland (half-brother of Lost Boys' Kiefer) claims Reeser for his pack of biker-surfer-jock-dork bloodsuckers, Hilgenbrink enlists the aid of Corey Feldman, doing his best growly Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice while reprising his Lost Boys role as a comics freak and vampire hunter.

Feldman gives the film a touch of self-aware camp, but otherwise, it's a dismally humorless collection of puerile thrills—two drunk girls kiss, the vampires engage in messy murder, and so forth. There's a brief attempt to probe the power-trip wish-fulfillment of vampirism, but eternal youth among Sutherland's coterie of dim, yo-bro eternal-adolescent douches seems more irritating than glamorous. And The Tribe's sense of cool consists of desperately winking references to the first film, right down to the prominently placed cover of "Cry Little Sister." In a closing scene and two brief "alternate endings," cameos from Corey Haim and Feldman's Lost Boys brother Jamison Newlander tease a possible Lost Boys 3. In the wake of this near-anonymous cheapie horror flick, that's hardly a compelling prospect.

Key features: A negligible five-minute making-of, and an irritating Feldman-narrated vampire survival guide.