While Re:Generator was at Comic-Con International we were treated to New Line Cinema’s awesome convention presence. Promoting their films Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Witchblade, they handed out some of the best swag of the convention. The one dark stain on their booth was their promotion for Lost Boys: The Tribe.
Painting the faces of convention-goers like vampires and having a space for Corey Feldman to sign autographs against the backdrop of a beat-up trailer right out of the movie probably seemed like a good idea. Where this idea went wrong was retailing that very same movie to the public. What follows is my account of what could very well be the worst movie in the history of American cinema, and yes I am including all Disney direct-to-DVD titles in my gauge.
From the beginning this movie is plagued with horrible, wooden dialog used to set the stage for the vampire infested town of Luna Bay (which still looks surprisingly similar to the vampire infested town of Santa Cruz, California). It’s a damn good thing I am a rabid fan of the original movie, or most of the concepts surrounding their vampire “lore” would have been confusing and idiotic. Presented in the most blatant way possible, the California twist on vampires is about as subtle as punching the audience in the face.
While the original movie heightened tension by hiding the vampires from view and putting off showing them to the audience for as long as possible, Lost Boys: The Tribe opens the movie with something absolutely unexplainable: vampire-on-vampire violence. After this blatant and overtly violent scene (in which it’s never explained why vampires are attacking other vampires), the subject is never touched again and the movie continues on as if nothing ever happened. The protagonists arrive in town in almost exactly the same manner as those in the original Lost Boys and end up living in nearly an identical situation. In fact, rather than nodding to the original movie, they blatantly ripped it off, including impaling a vampire on, yes you guessed it, taxidermy deer antlers.
What follows is an abject mess of bad acting, horrible movie cliches and attempts to use pop culture to make the vampires in Lost Boys: The Tribe seem young and hip. At some point in the film, Corey Feldman appears and proceeds to do a bad impression of himself and rattle off lines that would make Corey Haim want to shoot smack directly into his ears drums. I know, out-of-touch 80s actors have to eat too, so I really can’t blame Feldman. But I can totally blame the writers and director of this film for taking a brilliant character from another movie and brutally sodomizing it in front of millions of Americans. The movie culminates in a showdown between Feldman and the vampires so epic, that when it cuts to black to run the credits I said “are you fucking with me?” and ran to Wikipedia to make sure my DVD player didn’t somehow skip and jump past the climax of the film. Sadly, it didn’t.
I recommend this movie to anyone who wants to laugh at movies taking themselves too seriously. If you like to do your own impression of Mystery Science Theater 3000 while watching Corey Feldman debase himself on camera, this is the film for you. If I could somehow erase the part of my brain that saw this film, I still would not be able to sleep at night knowing that somewhere in this wide world, someone is about to pop this flick into their DVD player and see horrors that would have made Lovecraft shiver. I’m thinking of having more thumbs surgically attached to my hands so I can fully express my displeasure via a thumb rating system.
