The Stakelander (2016)

Very well executed

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I loved Stakeland, I hated The Stakelander.This film is not totally awful, but it's pretty darn close, and it doesn't hold a candle to the first film. Stakeland was a movie that was lovingly crafted and made well on a limited budget - this is B grade schlock that was clearly rushed and nowhere near the same love and attention was put into it.The acting is not as good, they've stolen concepts straight out of multiple other movies (The Book of Eli, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Road, just to name a few,) and the story is a rushed and incoherent mess.The villain makes little sense, the interesting concepts of the film are woefully underdeveloped and presented in a totally contradictory fashion - we are told that the world has entered a new 'dark ages', but then everyone is still using modern technology likes cars, electricity, modern medicine, military weapons and armaments, etc. And we are introduced to 'the Brotherhood' who are supposed to be a Christian sect who are in league with a vampire and her vampire hoard despite the blatantly obvious fact that she (and her vampire brood) would clearly be considered as demonic minions from the pit of Hell by any such religious group - but hey, there's no need to tell you why this should be or even explain how this partnership came to be because... reasons.But on the bright side, they managed to ham-fistedly shoehorn in a gay couple (did they get some sort of extra funding for the diversity points?) and then they keep labouring the fact that they're a gay couple - just in case you missed it the first time around.When I think about it, this film kind of feels like a cheaply made attempt to make conservatives and Christians look evil and bad while the progressives are the good guys fighting on the side of the angels. In a nutshell: this movie feels like a montage of set pieces and concepts that have been poorly put together, all the while someone forgot to actually write a plot to string all the various pieces (and concepts blatantly stolen from other movies) together as one coherent whole.Zero character development, wholesale abandonment of the lore established by the first movie, zero character arcs, blatant copying of other apocalyptic movies (including it's predecessor), poor acting, poorly executed and contradictory story points, action set pieces were poor imitations of the original, nowhere near the same level of attention paid to costume and world development (don't get me started on that awful and cheap looking fortified compound!), nowhere near as many vampires, the musical score was nowhere near as good as Stakeland (and was it just me, or did it feel like the first 10 minutes of the movie was scored by someone totally different than the rest of the film?)If this movie was a vampire, you wouldn't need to stake it through the heart because it was already dead on arrival.It's a real shame, because the first movie was an absolute unexpected cult classic worthy of all the praise it gets - in fact, if you haven't seen it already, forget this one and go and watch Stakeland instead!

Released to TV in 2016 and directed by Dan Berk & Robert Olsen from Nick Damici's script, "Stake Land II" (aka "The Stakelander") takes place a decade after the events of 2010's "Stake Land" where Martin (Connor Paolo) is living in New Eden in former-Canada with his wife (Bonnie Dennison) and daughter. After a group of vamps led by a blond vamp (Kristina Hughes) attack their makeshift paradise, Martin is forced to flee into the Canadian prairie where he finds Mister (Damici). They recruit a feral girl (Laura Abramsen) and eventually find succor at a barricaded community led by old friends of Mister (A.C. Peterson & Steven Williams). Unfortunately, the Vamps and The Brotherhood are on their trail.The first film was theatrically released whereas this sequel is straight-to-TV. However, they're of about the same production quality because the first movie was low-budget (although you couldn't really tell from watching it). The main difference here is that the events take place on the Canadian prairie (shot around Regina, Saskatchewan) as opposed to the Northeast USA in the previous film.I didn't like the eye-rolling gay subtext thrown in at the end (to appease SJWs, I guess), but it happens in a fallen world; and the post-apocalyptic 'world' portrayed here is decidedly fallen. Like the first film, "Stake Land II" is forlorn and gritty realistic, but the inclusion of The Brotherhood and the vamps usher it into Mad Max territory, although not as goofy. If you like post-apocalyptic adventures, like "Planet of the Apes," "The Postman" and "Dawn of the Dead," "Stake Land II" is worth checking out. The feral girl is akin to Nova from "Planet of the Apes" and is an interesting touch.The movie runs 81 minutes.GRADE: B-

I had fun with this one, mostly of course because it reminded me of the first, a vampire movie with a slightly different approach. It is quite obvious that the horror viewers are begging for anything unusual.As vamp movies go, there are a few with "cojones", like Daybreakers, presenting a complete society or Priest, with a new monster look, a better dystopian background.Now for Stake Land: a nice add-on to the genre, a small movie that was nicely welcomed by anyone. The second part succeeded throughout the movie but failed with the opposite side, where they should have worked just a little more. If that part would have been explored properly, I do believe Stakelander could have been easily just as enjoyable as the first. Nevertheless it is a good movie on its own and I do recommend it. All in all, I do hope for a third part, and with a little more effort, maybe we can have a nicely almost indie trilogy. One to remember!Cheers!

Traveling away from the fortified city, a man wanders into the previous saviour of their society who's now living in a vast, vampire-filled wilderness and tries to help him sort through his troubled past to help restore the peaceful society they remembered.This here was quite the disappointing and really underwhelming effort. Most of the film's problems are due to the fact that this one just doesn't have much of anything happening here, unlike the original which had a lot of enjoyable action scenes throughout. Instead, here the film is far more pressed for lame melodrama about the fight for survival in the wilderness and his search for his mentor that it takes plenty of time to actually get any kind of action featured within this one as we get scenes of him wandering around the wilderness meeting the loner family, finding him in the underground fighting club and the really endless scenes of the two of them hiking around with the captive woman that it really does feel like seemingly endless scenes that aren't in the slightest bit interesting and just really drag this one out. Likewise, once they get into the new compound the scenes of them meeting up with the locals living there and interacting with them as they get integrated into their lifestyle also makes this one quite overly bland and rather dull during here. That also produces the unwanted effect of keeping the vampires off-screen except for a few brief encounters throughout here which is the film's only good scenes but it really draws out how few scenes they're involved in when it's entirely possible to see how little scenes they're shown and comes off as furthering how flawed this is. It does come close to featuring some rather enjoyable moments here which is mostly centered on the vampires attacking as there's some rather fun, bloody sequences here that are part of the big encounters on display which includes the first encounter at the farmhouse which is really thrilling and gets in some decent brawling while the other encounters out in the wilderness comes across as rather bloody and exciting. There's still the finale of this one which is where there's plenty of rather fun and enjoyable action here which really works so well in generating the required action that carries this one off quite nicely with plenty of gunfire, explosions and brawling that takes place throughout the compound it really makes for quite the effective and rousing series of scenes that really manages to get the proper excitement and bloodshed required to end on a high-note. Still, it's flaws here really hold this one back.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Language.