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!
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