By Kamaria Porter When the vampire apocalypse comes you might think family, community, or even God will provide solace from things crawling in the dark. In Jim Mickle's “Stake Land,” the only thing our characters can rely on is a swift strike of a garlic soaked stake to the heart. We follow Martin (Connor Paolo), a teenager orphaned by a vampire and taken in by the peripatetic Mister (Nick Damici). Mister has a special hatred for the bloodsuckers and trains Martin in vampire combat. The undead are persistent, quick, but dim enough for our trained killers to take down. Along the way, Martin and Mister save a Nun from brutal rape, take in a pregnant woman, and add Marine to their team. They band together to fight stalking vampires and the brutal group of religious hypocrites calling themselves the Brotherhood.
Far from the biting wit of “Zombieland” and the pulpy fun of HBO’s “True Blood,” “Stake Land” is a bleak, winding nomadic story. Bloody scares make a thrilling beginning, but are replaced by threats from the Brotherhood -- the spawn of fascists and religious fanatics looking to rule over and degrade whatever the vampires haven't devoured -- and meditations on a world without order. Our characters move from town to town each more base than the last, until they trek up to the forest to hide. Through Martin’s narration, we track his growing hopelessness as human communities disappoint and vampires steal every shred of hope he dares to have.
I did like the serious tone and the unconventional family forged on the road by Mister and Martin. Yet these bonds and the social commentary never really settled in me because of the choice to use voice-over narration to reel out the story instead of dialogue and action between the living members of the cast. We can only guess what these people mean to each other, and their actions, whether expected or surprising, failed to draw me in. Paolo as Martin tells the story well enough, but I started to crave the vampires to see some action on screen. These scenes felt urgent with gory detail paid to makeup and performance of the night-crawling beasts. The movie has a budding suspicion for religion that never grew enough to stand for me to critique or consider the filmmaker's point. The leader of the Brotherhood Jebedia Loven (Michael Cerveris) commits atrocities while holding a Bible, but never stood for anything more than another person to be staked. For me, a more compelling commentary on the abuse of religion combined with scenes building the relationships of the characters would have provided the guts to go with the blood in “Stake Land.” | | By Alex Wilgus For whatever reason, it’s great fun to dream about the end of the world. The typical post-apocalypse film tends to consist of a fantastical event that wipes the world clean of government and re-orders civilization. Accordingly, humans are forced to rely on wits dulled by cushy society, religion shows its uglier side, and our heroes set out to find a rumored paradise that may just be too good to be true.
Jim Mickle’s ‘Stake Land” is a familiar yet memorable road trip through this genre. Mickle’s idea of hell on earth is that of a global pandemic that turns the good folks of America’s heartland into a teeming mass of vampires. By the time we join our two main characters, a quiet teenage lad named Martin and Mister, a grizzled old vampire hunter, the world has pretty much ended save for some small pockets of survivors. In true post-apocalyptic fashion, tensions are always high, danger lurks close at hand and every minute is lived out under a thick veil of doom.
Uneasy calm makes “Stake Land” stand out among other post-apocalypse films. Like Gareth Edwards’ “Monsters,” the energy is set very low. Mickle uses stillness and Martin’s poignant narration to build a tone of sweet dread, which he vents at several points with some expertly crafted fight scenes. The narration scenes are straight out of a Terrence Mallick movie, providing a needed emotional anchor. A cheekier reviewer might call this film “28 Days of Heaven Later,” and though several folks in my theater chuckled at hearing a character reach for profundity while liberally using the word “vampire,” the sequences work. Martin’s voice is far from saccharine and it was refreshing to see a horror film that welcomes emotional involvement. My only gripe was that these narration montages were used a just a bit too often, and I often felt prevented from experiencing the film’s drama in real-time.
“Stake Land’s” greatest strength is its vision of the American South. Having grown up not far from the film’s initial locations, I identified strongly with this American wasteland. Though monsters don’t roam the fields and rural “old-time religion” isn’t as scary as most directors make it out to be, the pervasive feeling of solitude brought it all home to me. The disconnected communities in the film are not so different from the isolated towns that make up much of the Southern countryside. Martin’s pilgrimage away from this geographical separation and his own personal estrangement from others might resonate with any country boy or girl who has struck out for the north in search of “whatever ain’t here.” “Stake Land’s” speculative premise conjures up real feeling. Mickle’s apocalypse offers a glimpse of one’s own self free from the petty complications of modern life and recalls what it is like to be young and in search of something better. |
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