Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Martin was a normal teenage boy before the country collapsed in an empty pit of economic and political disaster. A vampire epidemic has swept across what is left of the nation's abandoned towns and cities, and it's up to Mister, a death dealing, rogue vampire hunter, to get Martin safely north to Canada, the continent's New Eden.
Stake Land delivers a competent post-apocalyptic road movie with vampires, drawing obvious comparisons to The Road in tone and structure. The mentor-protégé dynamic between Mister and Martin works reasonably well, and the performances are solid if unremarkable. Visually it captures a bleak, desolate America adequately but without distinctive flair. The premise blends familiar post-apocalyptic and vampire-hunter tropes without much originality — the religious cult antagonists are a well-worn genre addition. The ending feels somewhat anticlimactic and rushed, failing to deliver meaningful payoff for the journey undertaken. A respectable genre effort that satisfies its modest ambitions without transcending them.