In the 2010 film, a young teen, Martin (Connor Paolo) is taken under the wing of Mister (Nick Damici) after his family is butchered by vampires. Turns out America has been flooded by vampirism, turning the country into a wasteland where survival of the fittest runs deep. As Mister and Martin search for a place called New Eden, they encounter numerous other stragglers whilst avoiding vampires and religious zealots, The Brotherhood. Episodic in its narrative – you can tell it started off life as a potential web series – Stake Land managed to at least build a fairly cohesive universe. Its box office may have been small, but its fan base was legit. As such, the surprise isn’t that it has a sequel, but that it’s taken so long to arrive. And has it been worth the wait?
Stake Land II: The Stake Lander catches up with Martin several years after his time with Mister. He’s settled down in New Eden with Peggy (Bonnie Dennison), the plucky woman he met in the dying embers of the first film. Now a father who recalls his time with Mister as fairytales for his daughter, Martin’s happiness is cut viciously short when, again, his family is brutally slaughtered by a reassembled Brotherhood, led by a powerful new vampire known only as the Mother (Kristina Hughes). With his world in tatters, Martin goes in search of Mister hoping that he’ll assist him on his quest for revenge. Spoilers: he finds him and the two are soon on the road again with the smell of vampire blood in their nostrils.
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John Noonan 