We can finally forget about The Tribe. Lost Boys: The Thirst is what a follow up to The Lost Boys should be. That’s not saying it’s anywhere near the level of the 1987 Joel Schumacher classic. Far from it. But when news broke that sequels to The Lost Boys were going straight to DVD, a drop in quality was a forgone conclusion. Our only hope was that the films tied into the original, paid respectful homage to it and included a bunch of dumb fun. Lost Boys: The Tribe didn’t. The Thirst, on the other hand, does and there by cleanses the palate of its awful predecessor. It’s not a “good movie” but it’s fun and Lost Boys fans can breath a sigh of relief that this third film attempts, and mostly succeeds, to do right by them. Hit the jump to read our exclusive review before it hits Blu-ray October 12.

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Lost Boys: The Thirst, directed by Dario Piana, once again stars Corey Feldman as Edgar Frog, a now total loser who is being evicted from his trailer and hasn't seen his brother Alan (Jamison Newlander) in years after he was turned into a vampire. Things turn around when a famous tween vampire novelist named Gwen Lieber (Tanit Phoenix) propositions Edgar to help find her brother Peter (Felix Mosse) who has been kidnapped by a group of vampires. Those same vampires happen to throw raves and hand out vampire blood posing as a drug, there by creating an unstoppable army of vampire club kids. Frightening. Frog, of course, agrees to help Lieber find her brother.

Obviously, this plot is total bare bones, direct to DVD nonsense. But the whole story is really secondary to the film’s need to poke fun at not only itself, but also its roots and genre. First there’s the author Gwen Lieber, a Stephenie Meyer clone (if Meyer were a swimsuit model) whose sole purpose is to let Frog bash the lovey dovey, Twilight vampire stuff in pop culture today. Then there’s an over the top reality star named Lars Von Goetz, (Stephen van Niekerk) who becomes a punching bag for the fallacies of reality television, such as Feldman’s own The Surreal Life and The Two Coreys. The best stuff, though, are the references to the original film. We don’t want to spoil too much but they are actually scenes from the first movie in The Thirst and one of the four in print Batman #14’s makes an appearance. The script even comes up with a way to cover Corey Haim’s death and the fact that none of the other characters from the first film appear in the sequels. None of this is brain surgery by any means, but it’s nice to know someone thought about it and put it in there.

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The script’s self-awareness is both its strongest suit and biggest pitfall though. When the film is referencing pop culture, it’s light and fun but when it turns into a cheesy one liner fest, The Thirst can be painful. Obviously, the bad dialogue was a specific choice made by writers Evan Charnov and Hans Rodionoff but it gets to be a bit much. And because of it, Corey Feldman’s performance turns into a brooding joke. It ends up working for the character and this movie, but he’s more likely to hit the Razzies than the Oscars.

One very smart choice made with The Thirst was getting away from the pointless romance that The Tribe focused on. There is a love interest, a comic book clerk named Zoe, (yes, there is a comic book shop in the movie) played by Casey B. Dolan, but she takes a back seat to simple action and vampire killing. And while the climax of the film seems to go on a little bit too long, the final fight is highly entertaining in a Phantom Menace type of way with a bad ass exclamation point on the end. The coda leaves a little something to be desired but at least it attempts to spin The Lost Boys franchise into a different direction. Whether it needs that or not is a whole other issue.

With Haim gone and Joel Schumacher, Jami Gertz, Dianne Wiest, Jason Patric and others nowhere to be found, Corey Feldman and fellow Frog brother Jamison Newlander do about as good a job as possible with the talent assembled for Lost Boys: The Thirst. They’ve created an entertaining Lost Boys sequel with a B-movie sensibility. It’s passable, watchable action packed schlock that will keep true fans of the series smiling.

Lost Boys: The Thirst hits Blu-ray and DVD on October 12.