Hey, a movie about me! I kid. However, as awesome as it would be to have a big-screen, big-budget movie about Ragnarok (the actual end times of the Norse Gods, not me), this is pretty damn good. Neil Marshall is 3 for 3, and if Dog Soldiers and The Descent weren’t enough to make the case, I am now a die-hard Neil Marshall fan and will go see anything he makes without hesitation. The dude is the new John Carpenter, as far as I’m concerned. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one, but now we have two, and that’s even better. Really, though the way the first third of the movie is framed and shot, the lighting, even the font in the credits, just screams LOOK AT ME, I WAS INFLUENCED BY JOHN CARPENTER! And I can’t think of anyone more worthy of being influenced by, so that’s just fine.
When a super-plague called the Reaper Virus devastates Scotland, a wall is built around Edinburgh and several other major cities. After a few years of violent crime and riots and fires, the virus, and all the people behind the wall, are presumed dead. 30-odd years later, the virus reappears in London, and super-badass Eden Sinclair is sent into the Hot Zone with a team of soldiers, because the British government has discovered survivors behind the wall, and with them, the hope of a cure. Because it’s either that, or, y’know, build another wall around London and flood the Thames, killing millions more innocent people.
It seems to me this is Marshall’s “kitchen sink” movie. It’s like he decided to test the waters by throwing every bat-shit crazy thing he could think of into one movie, and if the studios backed him and people bought tickets (which I hope they do more of, considering this thing cost $30 million to make and only made a little over $4.5 million the opening weekend, and I want to see Marshall put more stuff in U.S. theaters, dammit!), he’d get to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Take Escape from New York, add the APC scene from Aliens, the road chases from Mad Max, sprinkle on a bit of ebola and some medieval tomfoolery, and you’ve got yourself a Doomsday.
Eden Sinclair is your basic female Snake Plissken. As a little girl, she lost an eye and her mother in one of the riots started when the wall was closed. She has since channeled that bitterness into becoming the most ass-whoopin’est DDS (Domestic Defense Service) agent in the U.K. To replace her lost eye, she’s fitted with a bionic one which can record what she sees onto a little watch computer, as well as be popped out of its socket and held around corners to make sure there aren’t any bad guys coming. Like I said, kitchen sink.
Once behind the wall, it doesn’t take long for the crazy bastards, led by Sol, to find and kill most of the troops. Most spectacular of the deaths is the cannibal orgy where Sean Pertwee is burned alive and ripped apart and eaten by the mob.
Escaping from there, Eden and her one remaining troop and one remaining scientist are led by Cally, Sol’s sister and daughter of Dr. Kane, a scientist who was left behind when the wall was closed, and who Prime Minister Hatcher and his evil advisor Canaris think has developed a cure. Except, instead of developing a cure, they took over Castle Blackness in Scotland and have reverted to a medieval society, complete with Renaissance Faire costumes and tournament knight fighting!
And then they escape with grenades and break into a fallout shelter and steal a fancy sports car and deliver Cally to Canaris because Hatcher got splattered with Reaper-infected blood and killed himself, leaving Canaris as the new PM, except he’s a creep and told Eden before they took off in the chopper that he was going to let the virus burn itself out and destroy more of London before he cured it so he’d look like a hero but she taped it with her crazy bionic eye and gave the recording to her boss so he could take Canaris out of power. And he does, but she stays behind the wall, heads back to the crazy cannibals, throws Sol’s head (which she removed from his body by driving the previously mentioned fancy sports car through a bus with him riding on the roof) at them, and becomes their new leader. The crazy damn end.
The cast is pretty much a reunion of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. A good 80 % of the major cast are actors Marshall used in one or the other, and that’s just fine by me. Work with what you know will make you an awesome movie. I can understand why a lot of people don’t like Rob Zombie’s movies, but his impeccable casting is not one of them. People accuse him of loading the deck with cult legends just to say “hey, look who’s in my movie!” Or maybe he cast them because they were in all the movies he loves and is influence by, and THEY’RE REALLY FUCKING GOOD ACTORS! They didn’t become cult legends for no reason, people! And I hope Marshall makes a few legends out of his regulars as well, because they damn well deserve it. I hereby decree that it should be mandatory to have Sean Pertwee in every movie made from here on out.
Truth be told, there’s probably at least twice as much crazy stuff in there that I just forgot to mention (like the fact that Neil seems to hate harmless animals, as a bunny gets vaporized by a 50-caliber machine gun, and a cow gets run over by a tank within about five minutes of each other). If your requirements for solid entertainment are met by mobs of cannibal punks, knights with spiked flails, loads of gore, loud car chases, huge explosions, badass chicks with bionic eyes, face-melting viruses, and really bad 80’s pop music, then Doomsday is for you. And if you don’t like any of those things (excepting the bad 80’s pop music), then what the hell are you doing here in the first place? Go watch Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood again, you damn fairy.
The Moral of the Story: If you get blood from someone infected by a virus that makes bubonic plague look like SARS (remember when it was really scary for a couple of days and then everyone realized it was pretty much the sniffles?) splattered on your face, FOR FUCK’S SAKE DON’T GODDAMN LICK YOUR FACE!
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