Lost Boys: The Tribe

I am a big fan of Lost Boys from 1987 -- loved the humor, the MTV glamor, and the music. Humor, glamor, and excellent music is what made that horror movie good, I realized, after seeing this travesty of a sequel. I can't believe the same writers were involved! Personally, I could care less about gore and nudity. Seeing naked bodies is fine if you've created an erotic atmosphere (this movie doesn't have one). Gore I can do without. Whoever thinks horror is synonymous with blood and guts is operating in a different universe than I am. Edgar Allen Poe and other classic horror writers appealed to innate fears; they did not try to gross out readers. Spilled guts are sickening. They aren't scary.

Anyway, to the point: this movie was very disappointing. It has a pale, pale connection to the original and my suggestion is don't bother to waste an hour and a half of your time watching it.

The orphan and former surfer Chris Emerson (Tad Hilgenbrink) and his sister Nicole Emerson (Autumn Reeser) move to Luna Bay expecting to initiate a new life without housing expenses with their Aunt Jillian (Gabrielle Rose), but she charges rent to the siblings for a wrecked house, and Chris seeks a job working as board shaper to raise money for the unforeseeable expenses. While in town, he meets his acquaintance and also former surfer Shane Powers (Angus Sutherland) that invites Chris for a surf parting at night. Then the siblings unsuccessfully seek out the board shaper and vampire hunter Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) in his trailer trying to find a job and Chris leaves a message for him. They go to Shane's party and Nicole stays with Shane and drinks booze offered by him. Later she becomes a half-vampire and Edgar advises that she drank vampire's blood and can only be saved if the head-vampire is killed. Chris and Edgar search the hiding place of Shane and his tribe to save Nicole.

I saw the trailer of "Lost Boys: The Tribe" and I really expected a great sequel of "Lost Boys", but unfortunately I found a weak reference to the classic vampire movie. The writer used the same storyline and introduced some gore, many naked or half-naked women (the stunningly hot Moneca Delain, for example, "acts" undressing her tiny bikini and having shower and sex with Chris) and a weird thirty-seven year old Corey Feldman acting like a teenager trying to repeat the success of the original movie. However, the acting is flat and there is a total lack of humor and charm in this sequel, with a weak Angus Sutherland in the lead role. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Garotos Perdidos 2: A Tribo" ("Lost Boys 2: The Tribe")

Nobody expected this movie to be great, but it is truly awful. My advice would be to Skip it and go straight to The Thirst, this adds nothing to the plot or character development. It seem to mix up Sam Emerson's character with Alan frog, having vampires mention Edgar's brother a few times, then having a 20 second cameo in the end credits with Corey Haim.

The first low point, for me anyway, was the amount of swearing in the opening few minutes, it begins right after the Warner logo and is totally unneeded. The next big problem is the updated vampires, they aren't cool, not in the slightest, in an attempt to be "XTREAM" and "with it" these vampires stab each other and upload it to youtube. The creators obviously had no clue about the audience of this movie, maybe they didn't realise that the fans that saw the original are now Corey Felmans age. That's the beauty of the original it spans almost 3 generations, something the creators of this movie didn't know, thinking the audience would be comprised of self harmers and sex crazed 13 year olds.

The story itself plodded along slowly for the first 40 or 50 minutes, it's essentially an unenthusiastic remake of the original. It tried half heartedly to be a lost boys movie, It ended up copying many of the events from the first one. The script writer has taken most of the scenes from the original mixed them up and wrote some new lines of dialogue to glue them together. The "Magic" isn't there. It's missing a plot twist and some well needed lovable characters (maybe it's that lack of younger teens?). You also have Feldman over acting his heart out in an attempt to compensate for some of the other actors. It doesn't save the movie, but it is the highlight, in fact I cheered at the T.V when he appeared. Feldman's role is the same as in the first movie, right down to the dialogue, line for line in some places.

Many of the actors look bored, when being attacked by vampires most of the cast look like they're waiting for a bus. This brings me to another complaint, there is way too many over the top sex scenes crammed into this, I have no problems with sex scenes in movies, you expect it in horror movies, but when the two main cast members start having sex with everything on two legs, your movie is a porno. At the halfway point we are "treated" to a slow misplaced police chase scene, followed by the characters sleeping and a driving to the beach, nicely killing off any kind of momentum the movie had built up. There's a cool weapons talk in Edgar frogs van, where he explains all the vampire killing equipment, but this only leads to an end battle which fall flat on its face.

There is no plot twist or clever writing of any kind in this movie. I will not be sitting through it again, once is more than enough.

To even use the name "Lost Boys" in title of this movie is an absolute abomination in itself. For fans of the original cult classic, I would strongly urge you not to even bother wasting a second on this...yes, I too was excited when I heard that there was a sequel but I regret it now.

Gratuitous violence for violence sake, completely lacking any of the humour or wit of the original, devoid of any semblance of an imaginative or even remotely interesting plot and punctuated with spurts of mindless action. For those who have not yet watched the original but have instead had the misfortune of watching The Tribe, don't let this put you off - there's no comparison, the two movies are light years apart.

I confess, I rented this movie by accident. I thought it was the original Lost Boys when I scooped it up with a collection of other older movies.

When I realized it was not the original, I had hopes for something similar to the original (in quality) but I was disappointed.

The quality of the story line waxes and wanes. I totally get the parallel to the original movie, but the weak fight scenes and effortless slaying of the vampires left me thinking it would not have been difficult to do a better job of those scenes, had someone actually WANTED to present something better than what was shown.

One moment the vampires are demonstrating incredible speed and strength, then they are killed with very little effort. A group of vampires who "are capable of knowing what you are thinking before you do" are surprised and killed because they didn't see what was coming next in the mind of their slayer.

Yes, there were a few very attractive young women with very little clothing, and while that might carry a film to a certain degree, it wasn't quite enough to save this movie.

If I had to guess, they blew the budget on the initiation scene and had nothing left to fund a solid set of fight scenes.

Corey Feldman's performance may have been the highlight of the movie.