Produced by Larry Fessenden (who also appears as a bartender), this is a grim, downbeat vampire road movie. Having witnessed the slaying of his parents, teenage Martin (Connor Paolo) is rescued by a mysterious, hard-assed vampire hunter known only as Mister (Nick Damici), while the entire United States is being ravaged by a vampire plague. Becoming his helper, Martin accompanies Mister on a journey through the increasingly wintry, bleak and desolate back roads of the Northwest while in search of the apparent safe haven of 'New Eden'.

Stopping at various corpse-littered small towns en route, populated by pockets of surviving humans by day and ravenous vampires by night, the couple encounter a compassionate nun (Kelly McGillis), whom they rescue from being raped, a pregnant roadhouse singer, Belle (Danielle Harris), and an ex-soldier, Willie (Sean Nelson), while contending with a a vicious Christian sect known as the Brotherhood led by Jebedia (Michael Cerveris), who believes the vampire apocalypse to be a Godsend.

Balancing its gruesome on-the-road horrors with a depth of humanity missing from other films of its kind (John Carpenter's Vampires, the From Dusk Till Dawn series, although Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark is a noteworthy exception), this emerges as a far less trivial and compromised vision of post-apocalyptic America than Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend, the third and least interesting adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novella. Jim Mickle's film aligns itself more with John Hillcoat's The Road and George Romero's Living Dead series, in particular Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead, whose protagonists also head for the border to escape the horrors engulfing the USA, while attempting to dodge the undead and the not always friendly human survivors. As with Romero's zombies the vampires are sometimes sad (the teenage girl who shows signs of affection towards Martin) and comical (one is even dressed as Santa Claus).

Although some sequences don't quite come off – the Brotherhood dropping vampires from a helicopter onto a street carnival, Jebedia's transformation from a cruel religious nutter to cartoonish vampire villain – Stake Land is a serious, thoughtful piece of work, coming at a time when the sub-genre is saddled with annoying romantic or over-sexed vampires (the Twilight saga, True Blood, etc.). It borrows Matheson's concept of the virus mutating as it progresses to create a race of intelligent beings who are able to function as more than simply bloodsuckers (a thread that works its way into Romero's zombie films from Dawn of the Dead onwards). Strikingly photographed (the rushing clouds and stark landscapes are quite spectacular), solidly acted and scripted, Stake Land is a good example of a well worn theme given a surprisingly fresh, exciting make-over.

LLOYD HAYNES

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