If there’s one 80s cult film that deserved a truly great sequel, it would arguably be The Lost Boys. So many of us kids grew up loving the original movie, showing it to every friend that came round to visit and wearing out our VHS copies until the magnetic tape burned into the VCR heads. Warner Bros had teased for many years about following up their 1987 hit and now, after much deliberation, we finally have a successor…although I think most fans will agree it wasn’t quite the film we had in mind.
Similar in narrative to the original (although this time with the gender roles reversed), ex-champion surfer Chris (Tad Hilgenbrink) and his sister Nicole (Autumn Reeser) move into a dilapidated beach home in the seaside village of Luna Bay and soon discover the local elite has a taste for blood, eventually taking the young female sibling captive and leaving her brother to fight for her life before she becomes one of the undead. The fabulous Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) returns as the vampire hunter/Rambo enthusiast, providing the only connection between the two films to speak of.
The main disappointment of Lost Boys 2: The Tribe is its utter absence of heart. Unlike the cool, hip and boundlessly entertaining Joel Schumacher original, this tired follow up is completely drained of any vivacity or life it could have had and instead comes across more like a mishmash of sex, violence…and not much else. Never at any point amid the mindless mayhem is there ever a sincerity to the characters or the danger they find themselves in; the screenplay instead resorting to cheap gore gags and goofy bloodshed in the hope of hiding filmmaker detachment and disinterest. It’s this apathy that does the film the most damage - a true celluloid crime if there was ever one.
Aside from the problematic pacing that emerges in the films’ second half and the sacrilegious altering of the vampire rules, The Tribe also suffers from countless other problems that will no doubt fuel viewer frustration. The frenetically spastic editing style, atrocious performances (90% of Angus Sutherland’s dialogue of looped), rushed FX work and dire attempts at humor all serve to help sink this mess into the back of one’s memory and beyond. I can only hope Director P.J. Pesce was mislead into thinking he was making a forgettable TV movie and not a sequel to one of the most beloved and financially successful vampire movies of all time.
Perhaps the greatest injustice of Lost Boys 2 - regardless of the fact it was made to go direct to video- was the fact the two Corey’s weren’t offered starring roles. Those guys, along with Jamison Newlander, were the most endearing part of the first film and to shaft them so blatantly further personifies Warner’s cash-in motives for this, one of the most underwhelming sequels in recent memory.
Dir: P.J. Pesce
Writer: Hans Rodionoff
Cast: Tad Hilgenbrink, Autumn Reeser, Angus Sutherland, Corey Feldman.
Run Time: 90mins
Country: USA
Rating: R18+
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ReplyDeleteThe only good thing about this movie was the boobies in the unrated dvd ...LOL !
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