Delayed Reaction: Stake Land

Premise: Basically, The Walking Dead except vampires instead of zombies.

I’ve often lamented about how hard it is to find good horror. Preferences in the genre vary wildly. For that reason, RottenTomatoes is useless. Many of my favorite horror movies are barely Fresh if not Rotten. I can’t research films too much because that can spoil the fun of watching them. Low budget is a selling point more than other genres, so just because I don’t recognize anyone on or behind camera doesn’t mean much. So it’s a wide-open field with little guidance.

 

One method I’ve tried for finding hidden gems is that I went IMDB for two of my favorite horror anthologies (V/H/S and V/H/S/2), pulled up the filmographies of every writer, director, and producer attached, and added any horror movie I found that they worked on to the list. In practice, this has had a low hit rate; especially with the producers. While some of those producers were vital to putting those anthologies together and brought the same ethos to other projects, other producers just knew a filmmaker with a good idea and helped them out, financially or otherwise.

 

Stake Land is one of those movies from a producer of V/H/S, and I think it’s safe to say he isn’t one of the producers who doubles as a taste-maker. Stake Land isn’t bad. It’s just not very good either. At least, not what I was looking for. It’s more of a brutal post-apocalyptic movie than straight horror. The vampire creatures are decently scary looking. Some effort went into building the world of the movie. It didn’t do much for me though.

 

The narration was a big negative. I get that this movie needs some exposition. It’s a plotty movie and there are a lot of chapters that need some connection. It becomes a crutch though, and this movie is way more tell than show. The narration wasn’t all that interesting either. I would’ve enjoyed the version of this with a lot fewer words better. If nothing else, the lack of explanation would’ve created more tension.

 

Anyway, you don’t need to bother with this one.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend