Harefooted Halloween: Stake Land

What I Liked: The makeup and effects looked great for the most part.  The vamps aren’t afraid to get messy with black blood drooling down the entire bottom half of their faces.

What I Didn’t Like: There are a lot of problems with this film, like a real lot, but I’ll try to trim it down a bit.

They had the vampires be mindless animals with pretty much zero intelligence (pretty much, *cough* except for the main villain *cough*).  I don’t like this approach to this type of supernatural creature.  Vampires definitely have a primal side but if you’re gonna reduce them to something that’s dumber than a bag of hammers then what’s the point?  They act more like zombies than vampires which isn’t an effective use.  Leave vampires to their more brainy nature, they work best that way.

This thing is redundant as shit.  Our group of human survivors go from place to place and slowly check out an abandoned car or house or whatever and kill some vampires.  Then they run into some humans that may or may not want to kill them.  Our heroes leave the small community of humans and eventually stumble upon an abandoned site, kill vamps, etc.

Character development is almost zilch.  The young boy that we’re supposed to identify with takes the entire movie to finally be ok with killing vampires.  And that’s after his parents and just about everyone he knows gets killed by vampires.  On top of that we don’t learn anyone’s backstory (except for some of the main boy’s) which doesn’t help.

The boy’s narration isn’t really necessary and is way too fucking serious and way too fucking generic (especially for a post-apocalypse movie).

Overall Impression: First I just wanna say that this picture looks great for only having a $650,000 budget.  I’ll totally give credit to the filmmakers, and definitely the makeup and special effects people, for turning out a very good looking film for such a tiny budget.

With that said, there’s no excuse for the atrocious script.  Basically what they did was make a post-apocalypse zombie movie but replace the zombies with vampires.  Literally nothing else is different.  It’s like they thought if you made that one change and leave everything else alone (including how the zombies/vampires behave) then it would be a whole new ballgame. 

I want to say that this is just a very blatant rip off of The Walking Dead but they came out the same year (2010).  Everything about this movie is so uninspired and trite.  Every aspect is completely unoriginal.  It brings nothing new or even remotely interesting to the table.  I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Stake Land is insulting though.  It’s just an exceptionally run of the mill zombie…I mean vampire…no I mean zombie…movie.