Doomsday

Attention, apocalypse-hungry filmgoers: "Doomsday" may be the blue-light special you're looking for. There's slicing, there's dicing, there are punks and viruses and pustules and a badass female lead! And since writer-director Neil Marshall has turned his cinematic blender to frappe, they're pretty much all happening at the same time!

By Alex Markerson Mar 14, 2008 8:00 PMTags
DoomsdayJay Maidment/Universal Studios

Review in a Hurry:  Attention, apocalypse-hungry filmgoers: Doomsday may be the blue-light special you're looking for. There's slicing, there's dicing, there are punks and viruses and pustules and a badass female lead! And since writer-director Neil Marshall has turned his cinematic blender to frappé, they're pretty much all happening at the same time!

The Bigger Picture:  This over-the-top action-horror-sci-fi hybrid is bursting at the seams with gore and gleefully recycled end-of-the-world clichés: exploding heads, Mohawked cannibals with a taste for burlesque, medieval throwbacks and Escape from New York hijinks. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, you need read no further. Intrigued but unconvinced? Carry on.

When a nasty virus rips through Scotland, the authorities in the U.K. get a little overzealous with the quarantine, building a big fat wall across the country and leaving millions behind to die. Decades later, the reemergence of the virus sends a special-forces team, led by the requisite flinty cop (Rhona Mitra), into the no-man's-land in search of a cure. They promptly discover more survivors than anyone expects; said survivors are predictably (a) angry and (b) hungry, and there the troubles begin.

This is a sprawling, messy, riotous, not-quite-finished picture. Marshall's last film, The Descent, was a lean, claustrophobic shocker without a wasted frame. Here he's thrown in the kitchen sink and a bit of plumbing to boot.

The unruly result could no doubt have been better.

Doomsday isn't quite funny enough to make up for its inherent nastiness, some of the dodgier effects would have been better off on the cutting room floor, and Marshall's often edging toward the wrong side of the line between homage and outright theft. But it's hard to watch it without having at least a little fun, and that's what Doomsday and all the movies it's aping are for.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  The plot's from Escape from New York, the aesthetic is mostly courtesy The Road Warrior, a pivotal sequence could have swapped in footage from Aliens with no one the wiser. If you haven't seen any of these movies, watch them instead. They're better.