A cheesy, gruesome, loving rehash of an early ‘80’s post-apocalyptic B-movie, Neil Marshall’s Doomsday often feels cobbled together from bits and pieces of other (better) movies, but offers plenty of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind. It’s this year’s answer to Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez’ half of Grindhouse, told with just a little more conviction.
Present-day Great Britain: a deadly virus breaks out in Glasgow, killing thousands. The solution? A giant wall that quarantines Scotland (ho, ho).
Things seem to work out for thirty years until the virus reemerges in London; a special-ops team headed by Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) is sent into the danger zone to see if they can find a cure.
Glasgow is now overrun by wildlife and inhabited by post-punk cannibals foaming at the mouth (I’m not sure if anything has changed); most of Sinclair’s team is quickly dispatched of, leading up to a bravura mosh-pit sequence where the baddies, led by the deranged, mohawked Sol (Craig Conway), dance around to a Fine Young Cannibals tune while barbecuing a member of Sinclair’s team.
Mitra has a certain something – an unassuming modesty, a wink-wink sense of sincerity – that greatly elevates her character above the usual Milla Jovovich-type female Terminators we usually get as heroines in the genre.
Acting elsewhere is also above what one might expect, with Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell lending the film a little credibility and David O’Hara and Conway making for menacing villains.
The film is an eclectic mixture of all the post-apocalyptic trash that came out in the wake of The Warriors and The Road Warrior; many of them Italian-financed, NYC-set exploitation films that used the punk background for a startling vision of a future stuck in 1981.
Not that we really needed to be taken back to the genre; Doomsday is for those who can appreciate the rehash and few others.
Three great scenes are worth the price of admission: the aforementioned mosh-pit sequence; a battle with a knight in full armor that recalls Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake; and a climatic car chase that culminates with a severed head flying toward (and hitting) the camera.
It’s a far, far cry from Marshall’s previous film, the finely-crafted, claustrophobic The Descent, but works well enough on its own trashy terms.
Warning: this movie is about as nihilistic as they could get away with in a major release, with no shortage of violence directed against women, children, and animals.
