Review of Stake Land (2010) by Emily A — 18 Sep 2010

This? This won the People's Choice award for a Midnight Madness movie? Hearing that, I had such high hopes for this film and it seemed to disappoint on all fronts. Imagine a post-apocalyptic road movie with vampires, with none of the fun that comes with vampires. This film, I think, suffers from two huge problems: the filmmakers don't seem to care about thier characters and just throw them away willy-nilly (without letting you get to know them enough to like them). The main character is a dude who's as big a badass and as good at killing vampires as Woody Harrelson was at killing zombies in Zombieland. This would be really sweet if "Mister" took any pleasure in it whatsoever. This complete and total lack of levity saps everything that should be fun out of this movie and ends up making it a big, depressing mess. Nobody in this picture has anything to live for. Except the scary fundies who act as the villains and turn out to be the film's most interesting characters. Not that the audience really gets to find that out.

This movie isn't without merit though, and I'd like to commend the filmmakers for not being weenies when it came to putting horror on the screen. The opening sequence showing a single vampire attacking a family one by one in a barn led me to the conclusion that "this is some stone-cold shit." I kind of admire a team that is not afraid to kill not one but two babies onscreen. But man, you have to put it in the midst of a story that's worth seeing. The stone cold has to be balanced with enough warmth to give the story life, and Stake Land fails at this completely. It's like Zombieland, without all the things that made Zombieland fun (or if it took itself WAY too seriously).