Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Stake Land (2010) R

Nick Damici (Late Phases), Connor Paolo (Favorite Son), Kelly McGillis (Top Gun)

In a dystopian future where vampires have decimated society, a taciturn hunter mentors a young boy through the wastelands of America trying to reach New Eden.

After enjoying Late Phases a lot, I really wanted to love Stake Land.   But this wasn't a vampire movie... they were just the excuse for the setting of the
film.  What the film was really about was a prepper's wet dream about how depressing and hopeless a lawless, broken society would be.

At first, it seemed promising.  The vampires were a gruesome cross between zombies and vampires.  They didn't pull punches about how feral and ruthless they would be.  But then they came across a doomsday preacher leading the Brotherhood... an Aryan cult that worships vampires as the tool to cleanse the earth.

Then the movie kind of went sideways.

The good guys (a group that constantly changed around the core two heroes), ended up trudging endlessly looking for peace, and not finding it.  And then, just when Mister and the boy Martin ended up mere miles from their goal, the mentor suddenly disappears without a word.

The only counts I have is one holy crap moment at the very beginning when the vampires ate a baby, and really, if I'd known what the rest of the movie would be like, I wouldn't have counted it.  The rest was a couple of eyerolls... most notably at the point where the nun played by Kelly McGillis shot herself... because the shot for a suicide somehow sounds different than the other ten gunshots before it, and the kid turns around.

And then they lost a pregnant girl because, for some reason, they became utterly stupid and left her alone to go chasing noises in the dark.  Come on.

As a crafting movie, it's good for background noise, but there's a lot of travel with very little dialogue.  It's not going to be enough to keep your mind busy while working with your hands.

As I said, I wanted to love it.  I love the genre, I liked the actors... but I just couldn't fall for the endless trudging through hopelessness.  The ending just didn't have enough hope in it to make it a worthwhile payoff.  I gave this two out of five.





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