A few years ago Jim Mickle directed and co-wrote a film with actor Nick Damici about a zombie outbreak in a Manhattan neighborhood where the disease originated from plague-carrying rats. That film was Mulberry Street and is still one of the better pictures part of the After Dark film series – and by better I mean actually worth your time to watch. It does well to focus primarily on the characters for the better half of the first forty minutes so that when the outbreak spreads and hits the neighborhood full-on we actually give a damn and feel like there’s something to be lost when a character bites the dust.

It was this commitment to character development that had me excited for the second film from Mickle and Damaci about a vampire takeover in a post-apocalyptic landscape of the central United States – titled Stake Land. Damaci (lead actor as he also was in Mulberry Street) is a vampire killer/drifter known by his best friends as Mister and has been traveling North through heavy vampire and Christian occult terrain to a supposed refuge in what we know in the present as Canada – because vampires hate national healthcare. Along the way he passes by a family being mauled by a vampire and is asked to promise the parents of a young man that their surviving son will be looked after and brought to safety. Mister, not being one for sentiment agrees, but with the condition that the boy will carry his own weight and be a helping hand. If he becomes a burden, he’s on his own.

Tom Cruise is apparently in talks to reprise his role as Lt. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in a sequel that is 22 years in the making. That’s right, time to take another ride into the danger zone…