Stake Land

Vampires! But new stock. Nothing to do with the Count or boys from New Orleans. A million miles from the Carpenter ones, the good guys and bad guys in Twilight or any appearing in I Am Legend or Blade. They are a new race, absolute excrescence of our own. We'd bet our jugular that they were also ready for ambush in their gutters when McCarthy wrote The Road and Hillcoat filmed it. They are even crueller vampires than in 30 Days of Night. Disgusting. Ragged. Like Zombies. They don't suck, they don't slurp: they slit throats, they use machetes, they squeeze, they yank off and they gut. And they do all this in this fantastic film by Jim Mickle, who was the cameraman for movies such as Pride and Glory or Transamerica. A desperate western, a film set in the woods, an Apocalypse starring marvellous beings of the type that go down killing: Damici, Connor Paolo, Danielle Harris and Kelly McGillis.