Stake Land (2010)

 Written by Happywax     June 2011

Rating 9 out of 10

Director  -  Jim Mickle (Mulberry st)

Cast

 Nick Damici - Mister
Connor Paolo - Martin
Danielle Harris - Belle
Kelly McGillis - Sister
Michael Cerveris - Jebedia Loven

Well holy crap, I think you old pal Happy has just found his new favourite vampire movie, Radical rethinking of the vampire genre(and the zombie genre too) hearkens back to the early zombie films of George Romero. This is a film that rocks your world not because of the violence and gore but because it is a film of characters.
 America is a lost nation. When an epidemic of vampirism strikes, humans find themselves on the run from vicious, feral beasts. Cities are tombs and survivors cling together in rural pockets, fearful of nightfall. When his family is slaughtered, young Martin (Connor Paolo) is taken under the wing of a grizzled, wayward hunter (Nick Damici) whose new prey are the undead.

Simply known as Mister, the vampire stalker takes Martin on a journey through the locked-down towns of America’s heartland, searching for a better place while taking down any bloodsuckers that cross their path. Along the way they recruit fellow travellers, including a nun (Kelly McGillis) who is caught in a crisis of faith when her followers turn into ravenous beasts. This ragtag family unit cautiously moves north, avoiding major thoroughfares that have been seized by The Brethren, a fundamentalist militia that interprets the plague as the Lord’s work.

Director Jim Mickle first grabbed my attention with his awsome zombie-rat thriller Mulberry Street, in which Damici also starred and served as co-writer. They have teamed up again to deliver an even darker and bloodier shocker. Drawing on the post-apocalyptic frenzy described by Richard Matheson ( I Am Legend) and George Romero, Stake Land is a road movie with fangs, similar in its phantasmagoric journey to Gareth Edwards’s Monsters (which is another fantastic movie by the way). I havent seen a vampire movie this good since 30 days of night. This movie is a perfect example that if you have an awsome script and a kick-ass director, you dont need tons of over the top CGI  and a A-list cast of characters to make an awsome film, I guarantee this movie will be one of the top rated horror movies for 2011,(And I havent steared you wrong yet have!!) this movie is required viewing for all Horror fans ...........