“In desperate times, false gods abound.
People put their faith in the loudest preacher and hope they’re right.
But sometimes they’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
Stake Land found its way as a late addition to this year’s HMF when I couldn’t get my hands on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I chose it because it was watchable on Netflix, and people seemed to like it. The small number of critics who saw it were kind to it, and it was on a few lists of under-appreciated vampire films.
I didn’t like it, and don’t have anything particularly positive to say about it. Consider that a bit of a spoiler warning. If you love Stake Land, awesome. You might want to just skip my short write up. Mostly I think that shitting all over something is a waste of time. I usually try to just avoid writing about stuff I didn’t like, but HMF and other installments of “Another Day, Another Movie” make that harder. Just fair warning that the rest of this post is negative.
When it comes to lower budget fare, you often need to reset your gauges a bit. Acting, directing, editing, special effects, etc. will often be a bit rougher around the edges. That’s not always the case, with movies like A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night making other small budget efforts look bad, but there is definitely a certain forgiveness factor you need to include when watching smaller horror films.
Even with that in effect, I still think Stake Land was bad. This is a zombie apocalypse movie, they just call the zombies vampires. Why? I don’t know. Apparently vampires are mindless killing machines capable of using only the “lizard part of their brain.” Oh, aside from the main bad guy, who somehow became a “thinking vamp” for no reason that holds any water. Otherwise, these are just the fast zombies from the updated Dawn of the Dead with sharp incisors.
This is Zombieland without a sense of humor or any characters to care about.
The writing is especially bad. Cliches abound, the dialogue is awful, the villainous Brotherhood is poorly drawn, and the vampires operate with almost no internal logic outside of “wouldn’t it be cool if…”
Narration is used to bypass any attempts at genuine character development. For example, we are supposed to feel like a group of survivors is a family, not because of a single moment where that seems to be the case, but because our narrator told us it was true. And not just any narration, but the sort that feels like prose from the bad, overwritten novel a struggling author is writing in the middle of a movie about a struggling writer.
Don’t get me wrong, there are great films that have flimsy characters, or empty stories, or rehash old cliches. This just isn’t one of them.
Will I Ever Watch It Again? I barely made it through the first time.
