Corey Feldman's brave hike back from the post-confessional, gofer-sex-abuse wilderness began Tuesday night in Westwood, where he dropped by the LA Film Festival to introduce a screening of The Lost Boys and suffer a clip from the vampire classic's forthcoming straight-to-DVD sequel, Lost Boys: The Tribe. We use the term "classic" loosely; the 1987 original doesn't age that well, but for its cast alone remains one of its era's more interesting (and better-looking) time capsules. And in relation to what we saw of its follow-up's kind of embarrassing exploitation effort, it's just about perfect.

But there's Feldman, dropping in again as vampire-killer Edgar Frog ("Did somebody order stake?") amid fireside lesbian kisses, gratuitous flashing and prodigious bloodletting. We mean, we know things have been better, Corey, but... Why?

"Has anybody heard the relativity of physics kind of spelled out through the transcripts of the biological study of ancient man?" he asked the baffled crowd, apparently invoking the new-age synonym for "paycheck." "No?" he continued. "OK! Then I guess we'll just go to the simple answer: It was a good script. All right, thank you very much."

More silence. Jesus, Corey, stop. Save yourself. Just—

"No, it was a long process actually," he said. "It was a long, complicated process because obviously this a film that the original was held in high esteem by many a fan out there, and as PJ [Pesce, The Tribe's director] so eloquently put it at the beginning of this, he didn't want to be held up with torches and ransacked."

"I still think no matter what, it's not like Citizen Fucking Lost Boys Kane," Pesce said.

"They gave me the [first] script, which was by somebody else, and it wasn't a very good script," Feldman added. "It seemed like they were just throwing it together, and I wasn't really interested in that. Not only that, but I wasn't too involved; they just had a cameo in it for me." Eventually, we learned, Warner Bros. hired a new "writer," reintroduced Corey Haim's character and gave them more to do. Feldman met with Pesce to "see where his head was at."

"The conclusion was that the people making it were fans of the first film and planned to do it with honour and hold it in high regard," he said. "It was quite a compliment; I was excited about getting into bed with people who were lovers of the film." Awkward pause. "Casting couch, that's all I'm saying." No shit. We could all use a cigarette right about now.

Tags: corey feldman | corey haim | laff | los angeles film festival | lost boys 2 | pj pesce | the lost boys