[HorrorScience] Stake Land (2010)

Reading time: 7 minutes

Qualification

Stake Land

Year

2010

Duration

98 minutes

Director

Jim Mickle

Distribution

Connor Paolo, Gregory Jones, Traci Hovel, Nick Damici, Kelly McGillis, Michael Cerveris, Danielle Harris, Marianne Hagan, Tim House, James Godwin

Script

Nick Damici, Jim Mickle

Having finished the mini-cycle of Rob Zombie within HorrorScience, I know that I left some films without analyzing, such as the remakes of halloween and halloween 2, but this has been on purpose since those films will be analyzed in the next cycle dedicated to the saga halloween.

This time I want to talk about a movie that I saw a couple of years ago and that I came across again a few days ago, reviewing my DVD collection. After reviewing it I can say that it seemed as good as the first time I saw it, and this time I realized that the director of the film is the same as the older one and that I also liked it a lot.

Stake Land (or its absurd Spanish title: underworld vampires) is the second film directed by Jim Mickle, a new and promising director within the genre, who 4 years after his first feature film called Mulberry St. (and which I will analyze soon in this same section) once again demonstrates that you can be original when making a low-budget film with a very repeated and used theme. In Mulberry St. the concept of zombies was used and modified, and in Stake Land It's about vampires.

The film focuses on a group of characters who are traveling north through several towns through the heart of North America, in search of a supposedly safe place, known as New Eden. We will start by looking at the young man Martin (Connor Paolo) traveling in a car driven by mister (Nick Damici) and his voice-over telling us about the horrible things he has seen and how his life has changed after certain events will serve as a prologue for the scenes that will follow. In these we will see how Martin was one night with his parents and his dog, when suddenly They are attacked by a creature that looks like a hybrid between a vampire and a zombie.. Mister finds Martin and rescues him, killing the vampire and then Martin's parents before they become one of those creatures. Martin's father, before dying, asks Mister to save his son, and he immediately cuts off his head.

[HorrorScience] Stake Land (2010) — The brilliant Mister and Martin, the protagonists of this film

We return to Martin telling us how as the months went by the cities became more and more dangerous, which is why Mister avoids them and travels west and then east again but always pointing north. We will also find out that the religious sects They proliferated more and more, and each one prophesied about the arrival of a savior who never arrived, and in its place ended up arriving misfortune and starving death, represented by those vampire-creatures.

Mister has a lot of experience in killing vampires and hand-to-hand combat, and he dedicates himself to training Martin in the arts of fighting in addition to transmitting all his knowledge to him to not only make him able to fend for himself, but also to become a useful companion in this fight for survival that both must face on their way to New Eden.

The film is often reminiscent of those classics. westerns that we saw as children where heroes fought for everything that is right, and the character of Mister is like one of those heroes always dedicated to doing the right thing and putting all his effort into doing something good within all the evil and death that occurs in that infested world. And not only does he rescue Martin from certain death, but later they both meet Sister Anna (Kelly McGillis), a nun, who is being attacked and Mister does not hesitate to rescue her and kill her two attackers, one of whom turns out to be the son of the leader of a religious sect called The Brotherhood (The brotherhood). This leader is called Jebedia Loven (Michael Cerveris) and, how could it be otherwise, interprets the vampire-zombie plague as a work of the Lord to cleanse the world and achieve a new beginning.

Along the way our heroes will come across some safe areas where there are survivors and which are protected from access by strangers. Some of these areas are controlled by religious cults that await The End of Days, and the one that will be shown to us as one of the most dangerous cults of all in terms of murdering innocent people and bringing despair to the minds of the defenseless is the one led by Jebedia.

La aparición de este culto religioso y de todos estos fanáticos que creen que serán salvados por seguir los designios del Señor y que las plagas y la destrucción humanas son Su Obra me parece algo tan acertado dentro de este guión como realista, ya que más de una vez se ha visto la aparición de este tipo de cultos cuando ocurre algún atentado contra un país o una agrupación o incluso cuando empezaron a circular las especulaciones acerca de que en el año 2001 se acabaría el mundo tal como lo conocemos.

Stake Land es una película notable, bien filmada a pesar de no ser una producción millonaria, buen trabajo de maquillaje, con un guión sólido y excelentes interpretaciones por parte del reparto de actores, destacando el papel de Mister como un personaje fuerte y seguro de lo que hace.

La atmósfera general está muy bien lograda, y logra darnos la sensación de estar viendo un mundo apocalíptico y desesperado que es claramente ficticio pero a su vez contiene elementos que lo hacen posible y ciertamente realista.

Datos curiosos:

El guión de esta cinta está escrito por el director Jim Mickle y por Nick Damici, quien interpreta además al personaje principal de esta historia: Mister.
Los productores, Glass Eye Pix, crearon 7 episodios de una serie para la web y que conforman una precuela de la historia que vemos en esta película. Cada uno de esos 7 episodios está enfocado en un personaje en particular, y las historias de 4 de esos 7 episodios también fueron escritas por Nick Damici.
El guión fue pensado originalmente para ser realizado como episodios cortos de una serie. El productor Larry Fessenden, mentor de Mickle, sugirió que debería hacerse en formato de película, aunque habría que cambiar algunas cosas. Fue así que Mickle junto a Damici reescribieron ese guión original, y agregaron a los cultos religiosos en la historia, además de intentar enfocarse más en los personajes que en los monstruos, y de hacer que a pesar de ser un mundo apocalíptico no se vea tan gris y desesperanzado como en otras producciones del género con temática similar.