I’ll say this about the second ‘Lost Boys’ straight to DVD sequel ‘Lost Boys: The Thirst’, in that it is scads better than the movie it follows in ‘Lost Boys: The Tribe’ and it is more of a sequel to the original as opposed to that other movie which, truth be told, was just a lame remake. Now… saying that ‘Lost Boys: The Thirst’ is better than ‘Lost Boys: The Tribe’ is a lot like saying athlete’s foot is better than jock itch, but it is better. That’s something.

Our film opens with Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) along with his ginormous head to body ratio busting in, with his brother by his side, and murdering some vampire infested Unites States Senator. I’m not quite sure what this has to do with the movie overall other than introducing us to the character of Blake (Matthew Dylan Roberts) who will show up later as Frog’s version of Q and infecting his brother with vampire juice. I was thinking murdering a United States Senator, vampire or not, might’ve had some consequences or repercussions but I would be incorrect.

Years after that incident Edgar is down on his luck and on the verge of getting evicted from his double-wide when he makes the acquaintance of this universes version of Stephanie Meyer in vampire romance author Gwen Lieber (Tanit Phoenix) who offers Edgar a tidy sum to find her brother Peter who has been kidnapped by vampire DJ’s. Why would vampires kidnap the brother of the author of horrible vampire romance novels, other than to convince her to stop writing them, is beyond us but they’ve gone ahead and done it. Initially Edgar wasn’t all that interested until he gets the 411 that the alpha vamp will be in his little town of San Cazador California in the form of record spinning, hip hopping, DJ-X (Seb Castang). Yep, the alpha vampire, the king of kings, the first and the last in the vampire world is a rave party hosting DJ. And he’s not even a very good one at that.

Now newly motivated Edgar is ready to end the vampire scourge. On his side he has his good friend Zoe (Casey B. Dolan) who runs a comic book shop which makes her about as qualified to hunt vampires as anybody else, there’s also an obnoxious reality

TV star and his cameraman on the team but we’re not going to worry about them too much, and Edgar would really like the help of his brother Alan (Jason Newlander) but he has a personal vampire thing he’s dealing with and is a downer to be around. But the worst part is that the crap vampire DJ and his friends have created a new drug called ‘The Thirst’, hence the title, with just one hit turning the imbiber into a razor toothed blood thirsty vampire.

Down they go into the rabbit hole Rave Party armed with Holy Water, stakes a-plenty and garlic… poised to kick some vampire ass. But of course, everything is not what it seems. Prepare to not be surprised.

While it is true earlier on in this little article I compared this movie and its predecessor to jock itch, jock itch isn’t all that bad if you scratch it the right way. Or better yet get someone, preferably female, to scratch it for you. So while we can’t… or won’t go so far out on a limb to call ‘Lost Boys: The Thirst’ a good movie, mainly due to a narrative that’s too scattershot, plot twists that you can see coming at you a mile away, Corey Feldman’s huge head and small body often distracting us from what’s happening on the screen, not to mention the sound of his voice… it was still kind of a fun film to sit through. Just a little bit.

Directed by one Dario Plana, who previously helmed the ultra slick but completely vacuous ‘The Death’s of Ian Stone’, shows with this movie that while the auteur might not be a man of substance, he certainly has style. The movie looks great, it sounds great, it has great looking people in it… except for Mr. Feldman of course… and some of these great looking people know how to deliver a line. We particularly liked Tanit Phoenix and her rendition of Emily Blount-lite in this movie, replete with her Tomb Raider gear in the final vampire Rave Raid. Plana powers through the banal dialog and silly plot by keeping everything moving at a rapid pace, though for a vampire movie it was pretty light on the blood and gore with the vampire deaths being presented as cute sparkly puffs of smoke. You’re gonna have to watch that ‘True Blood’ TV show if you want to see vampires slaughter presented properly I’m afraid.

True enough, ‘The Tribe’ set expectations for this Straight to DVD sequel pretty low and as such ‘The Thirst’ would’ve had to work overtime to be worse than that movie, and while it certainly was no cinematic masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it had its charms. ‘The Lost Boys: The Thirst’ doesn’t take itself all that seriously, has some decent humor working in its favor and it is consistently easy to watch in addition to paying homage to the late Corey Haim in the process. Not great but definitely a treatable form of jock itch that we can deal with.