Stake Land hits its mark
Young Martin (Connor Paolo) faces a vampire in "Stake Land"Post-apocalyptic scenarios never used to be inundated with the undead. Take the classics: Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, The Terminator. Plenty of unsavory characters who’ve fashioned impressive wardrobes out of leather, your pick of unspeakable acts. But no zombies.
Of late, our dystopian worlds tend to be overrun with the plague-ridden. Whatever killed off the humans and caused the US government to collapse was not nuclear, not alien, but viral, spread one sweet bite at a time. Ah, sweet human flesh.
In the case of Stake Land, blame a vampire epidemic. Unlike standard animated corpses, who stumble about while comically shedding limbs, these “vamps’’ are more orc-like: buff, agile, growling, with a bad case of ’roid rage. We don't know where they came from, or what caused the plague, but you don't want to mess with them.
Still, the standard wooden stake to the heart does the trick. Or twisted and hammered into the sternum. Or jammed into the brain stem. Each type of undead -- "vamp," "scamp" and "berserker" --- has its own special way to stop ticking, and "Mister" knows each special way to kill 'em good.
When Stake Land begins, a lone, vampire hunter known only as Mister (Nick Damici, of World Trade Center) saves young Martin (Connor Paolo) just as the baddies kill his parents and munch on his baby sibling. Through spewing black blood, Dad's last burbling words to Mister are "Save him." The misanthropic takes Martin under his wing and trains the boy in anti-vamp hand-to-hand combat. There's a nice scene of the kid waiting in an oversized football helmet and pads, armed with a wooden spear, as Mister unleashes a zombie captured in the trunk of his car expressly for his impromptu boot camp.
The boy deemed ready to kick his own undead butt, together, surrogate son and father cruise northward in a clunky gas guzzler hoping to reach Canada, a.k.a. “New Eden,’’ a promised land where life is supposedly better and the weather's too cold for the vamps to survive. At night, they chain length of metal fencing to the car's exterior to protect them as they sleep. Sometimes they stay up at night to lure the zombies with bait like a teddy bear, then pounce. Mister collects teeth from his trophies They pick up a nun, played by a shorn, haggard-looking Kelly McGillis (a long way from her Witness and Top Gun days), a pregnant girl country singer (Danielle Harris), and an Army deserter (Sean Nelson). In the weakest plotline, they must fight off a creepy cult leader (Michael Cerveris) and his burlap-wearing minions. It seems that in the future, the end of the world has encouraged nihilistic Christian sects -- what else is new? --- and this cult has a way of air-dropping the undead fodder on the encampments of the living, terrorist-style, much like medieval siege engines hurled plague-ridden carcasses over the ramparts to infect castle residents. There's also marauding bands of cannibals (though it's unclear if, taxonomically, they're undead as well or just hungry).
As in The Road Warrior, a young narrator’s experience is the prism through which we see rape, death, devastation. We watch Martin morph from wide-eyed boy to jaded young man. Damici plays Mister as all brood and no bluster. More of a tight-lipped western drifter than sci-fi action hero, he keeps watch while the others sleep, and utters advice like “One day you’ll learn not to dream at all." The ultimate coming of age training.
Other undead movies needlessly foreground the action. Stake Land has its fight scenes, and they're shot conventionally, with none of that slow-mo, high-flying acrobatic all in vogue. Here, they action is also secondary. While paying debts to John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, director Jim Mickle (Mulberry Street), who wrote the script with Damici, has his own aesthetic, which smartly lingers not on violence but on the silent, poignant details of this desolate world— a ruined factory, an abandoned home the travelers scavenge for food and a place to sleep, a Virgin Mary figurine left on a makeshift grave. The beautifully bleak vision is enhanced by Ryan Samul’s exquisite cinematography and composer Jeff Grace’s plaintive piano and violin arrangements. In one touching moment, McGillis recognizes that one of the attacking vamps is a fellow sister of the cloth. She winces as the nun is finally laid to rest, but not before the bitch is skewered by a stake.
This doomed world may feel familiar, full of paranoia and desperation, but Stake Land remains one of the genre’s smartest entries in years. As in The Road, our hope hinges on the survival of this makeshift family. Which suggests the hidden purpose of zombie movies: Given these folks’ post-apocalyptic woes, can the recession be all that bad?
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, his travel memoir investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures the Huffington Post called “part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky," National Public Radio described as "Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road" and Wired.com proclaimed, “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes.” Follow Ethan's adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.
Does Justin Cronin's "The Passage" live up to the hype?
Where the wild things are
In Justin Cronin’s blockbuster hybrid novel, the thriller elements wrestle with the literary, while super vampires maul fleeing humans
Weighing in at 766 pages and 2 pounds 6 ounces, “The Passage’’ is designed to be big. Big plot, big themes, big sweep. And the author, Justin Cronin, landed himself a big advance. After a knock-down, drag-out bidding war, Ballantine paid about $3.75 million for the book plus two sequels in the pipeline. Director Ridley Scott’s production company ponied up $1.75 million for the film rights. “The Passage’’ has become one of those media machine-generated blockbusters, feeding upon the weight of everyone’s expectations. Like a small financial entity unto itself, it’s too big to fail.
Still, “The Passage’’ is a gamble. With this post-apocalyptic, doorstopper of a saga, the author enters a new universe. In his former life, the New England native wrote works of literary fiction, “Mary and O’Neil’’ and “The Summer Guest,’’ which won prizes like the Pen/Hemingway Award. They’re set on the planet Earth we know and love. No undead in sight.
“The Passage’’ is different. It began as a storytelling game with Cronin’s then 9-year-old daughter. She wanted to spin a yarn about “a girl who saves the world.’’ After he started writing, Cronin, an English professor at Rice University in Houston, sensed that, like the virus the plot hinges on, the project was changing him. He noted in one interview, “I knew by the time I’d finished this I would be a different person — and a different kind of writer.’’ He’d given birth to a monster.
And “The Passage’’ is a bastard beast, a literary-thriller hybrid both portentous and predictable. Think Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road’’ crossed with the movie “The Road Warrior,’’ with the psychological tonnage of John Fowles’s “The Magus,’’ and the “huh?’’ of “The Matrix.’’ Mix in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy of fellowships and quests and add Stephen King’s dark, virus-ridden vision in “The Stand.’’
Now comes the $5.5 million dollar question: Does Cronin pull it off?
First, know “The Passage’’ is no bedtime story. Suffice it to say, by the time we reach page 50, we’ve already been introduced to adultery, prostitution, and murder. The premise: A few, unspecified years in the future (where, thankfully, USA Today is still in print), a nasty virus unleashed in the Bolivian jungle gives its victims a kind of immortality. Naturally, this interests the US military, who could sure use this superpower in its endless fight against terrorists who strike at home and abroad.
So, a secret military project begins deep in the Colorado mountains. Those experiments go awry, and the 12 test subjects escape from their glass chambers — why does this always happen? — and begin their fearsome rampage across the nation. With every bite they spread the gift that keeps on giving. The victims become jacked-up killers themselves, glowing vampires on steroids known as “virals.’’
Before you know it, complex plotlines are bulldozed across the landscape and laid down like the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System — plotlines that are broad and clear and fast, and destined to run together. Cronin intercuts the stories of a death row inmate, a nun, a pair of FBI agents, and a desperate mother and her daughter named Amy. Familiar themes emerge: science and the military punished for their hubris; the man who turns on bureaucracy to do what’s right; the child prodigy whose secret powers might save us all. That’s just in part one. The story builds from there, following more than a dozen main characters and unfolding over decades.
Certainly Cronin has fun with his destroyed America, one in which Jenna Bush was governor of Texas, and, in an eerie parallel with today’s headlines, the oil industry is under federal protection. Later, some decades after the initial outbreak, we encounter a whole set of new characters, and they take us through the second half of “The Passage.’’ This ragtag colony survives in a Walden-like castle compound, fighting back the bloodthirsty devils. They also raid the ruined mall — REI, Footlocker, and the Gap — for supplies, stumble upon dusty relics like “Where the Wild Things Are’’ (get it?) and wonder whether anyone else has survived. “Grief was a place . . . where a person went alone,’’ Cronin writes. Life is “a series of mishaps and narrow escapes.’’ In these moments, “The Passage’’ surpasses genre fiction, and approaches existential meditation.
Cronin’s prose is thick and meaty and at times elegant. Texas is described as a “state-sized porkchop of misery’’; 9/11 is called “the money shot of the new millennium.’’ In another passage, Wolgast, the FBI agent with the heart of gold whose fate is tied to Amy’s, takes a nap, and enters “sleep’s antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories.’’ Indeed, much of “The Passage’’ takes place in the murky minds of its protagonists.
Cronin has a literary novelist’s eye for detail and local color, and an eagerness to create believable characters with feelings. However, this impulse collides with the necessities of the supernatural, sci-fi horror thriller. The collision is not always pretty.
For one thing, Cronin has a lot of ground to cover. That means passages of exposition, some of them lengthy and rammed down the throats of characters. An inventive mix of e-mails, diaries, and documents partially alleviates this need for our heroes to spout off too much. But just as often, the interior voice mumbo-jumbo — nightmares and telepathic messages — leaves the reader scratching her head.
The other trouble is emotional gravitas. Cronin’s roving narrator enters the heads of each character. They’re compelling folk, to be sure, desperate to hope, and afraid to love in the face of their bleak condition. But we’re asked to juggle the detailed back stories and desires of so many characters, it’s hard to know on whom to hang our heart strings. Thankfully, the connective tissue across space and time is Amy, the “Girl from Nowhere,’’ the one we meet on page one who we can guess has a role in the story’s conclusion.
Still, some readers deep into “The Passage’’ will be spellbound. They’ll want to know how it turns out. And they’ll also wonder who will play whom in the movie version. How the stunt people will stage the battles and chases. And how cool it will be for the set designers to build malls and casinos, then blow them up.
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms,’’ can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com. 