Stake Land Review - Run! It's the Zomb- er...Vampires!

Trigger Warning: Rape, murder, and gory violence.  Also SPOILERS.

Stake Land (2010) is a zombie apocalypse movie starring Connor Paolo and Nick Damici and directed by Jim Mickle.  The movie follows protagonist and narrator Martin, a sixteen year old boy, and the badass hunter that saved him from being eaten, known only as "Mister", as they travel to the near-mythical paradise of (you got it!) CANADA.

I say zombie apocalypse because even though the monsters in the movie were vampires...they were fucking zombies.  They growled, they shuffled, they had that expression you get when you wake up with a huge hangover; so let's be honest here.  If it walks like a zombie and quacks like a zombie, it's a zombie.  Just giving a zombie fangs does not make it a vampire.  They weren't even particularly good zombies.  They just seemed like a less-expensive rehash of the 28 Days Later or Resident Evil virus zombies.  They even drooled blood like those in the former movie.  One particular strain was even killed by getting staked in the brain -- absolutely nothing like how you would kill a vampire.  Stab Dracula in the head and he'll cough it out and shove it up your ass.

I had a few major gripes with this movie that I'll cover first, starting with the stakes, since I'm on the subject.  The characters made a big showing of carrying around these little pieces of wood in sheathes like knives, but when you actually looked at them they were little thicker than a pool cue.  In fact, they looked downright flimsy.  Some of them weren't even straight.  If you tried to stab through a dense piece of bone like the breast plate with one of those, it would snap like dry kindling and you'd have a real nasty pain in the neck right after.  Couldn't you find an old baseball bat in the post-apocalyptic suburbs, guys?

Next, the makeup was awful.  There were some pretty decent effects, don't get me wrong, but the vampires looked like an undead death metal band.  The first one you see is especially bad and wears what is obviously just black and white face paint like some sort of vampire clown.

OH FUCK OH FUCK

Another thing that I thought was interesting, yet confusing, was the use of vampire teeth as a form of currency.  Did it measure some sort of as yet uninvented badass score that allowed you free shit from every town you find yourself in?  It confused me because, in a post apocalyptic society the worth of a tradeable object would be measured by its usefulness.  Can I eat vampire teeth?  Burn them in the fireplace to keep me warm?  Make a pretty necklace?  When you think about it, vampire teeth are about as useful as tits on a zombie.

Totally worth iiiiiitttt!!!

The main antagonists in the movie, outside of the ever-present vampire predators, were a bunch of skinhead, redneck stereotypes called "The Brotherhood".  They're a religious cult whose goal in the movie is to kill all non-white, non-protestant heathens, including the black guy.  This is a concept that's been done to death, exhumed, paraded around like Weekend at Bernie's, and buried again.  Apparently we are to assume that in the likelihood of any sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland the Tea Party will start fucking everyone over.  The Stallone Judge Dredd did it, Resident Evil did it, Left 4 Dead 2 even turned the trope on its head and made the rednecks protagonists.  Please. just. stop.

Which brings me to another point.  Every character except for Martin and Mister are seemingly brought in just to get raped and then die.  Sister, a nun who shows up to act as a sort of mother figure for Martin, doesn't even get a real name, but she gets raped TWICE before committing suicide.  Delightful...  The pregnant girl, Belle, is only there so we can start to like her despite her uselessness before she gets vampire raped and dies. But hey, movie, at least you managed not to kill the black guy first!

Now, there were a few things I liked about the movie.  They weren't afraid to hit you in the face with blood and gore, including one scene near the end that had me somewhere between never eating again and in stitches laughing.  I genuinely liked the two main characters.  Martin goes from scared kid to experienced hunter in a very believable young hero's journey sort of way, even if he sort of spectacularly fails when it matters most.  Mister (Nick Damici) is legitimately badass, at one point taking out a pack of hungry vampires AFTER getting tied up and left for dead by the Brotherhood.  Honestly, they could have just focused on those two the entire time without adding all the filler characters to provide gruesome death scenes.  Lastly, the main antagonist, the cult leader Jebedia Loven, is generally boring until he has his own moment to shine and totally redeems himself.

Finally, there were a few choices on the part of the movie-makers that I'm just not sure how I feel about.  I feel like if the movie is not Lord of the Rings, it usually doesn't require narration.  You should show and not tell, and if you're showing AND telling it gets redundant, but Connor Paolo did a passable job of it.  Second, there were many different types of vambies and only one throwaway line about "different mutations" to explain them.  Some shambled, some ran, some seemed to be nearly human, one talked -- make up your damn minds or provide some sort of reason!  Still, some of them did add to the horror premise which is why I don't completely hate the idea.  Lastly, there's Belle's death: I like that they took the chance to kill a pregnant woman and her unborn child.  Not a lot of filmmakers have the balls for that choice.  All the same, I'm not sure if there was a real purpose to her death outside of a way to "grow up" Martin some more.  (As if killing a horde of zombies from Virginia to Canada wasn't enough.)

All in all, I'll give this one 2/5 stars.  It's watchable, I didn't hate it, but I'll probably never see it ever again.