Doomsday (Neil Marshall, 2008)

[Fletch F. Fletch]

An amusing review over at the Village Voice.

[MichaelB]

Amusing and extremely accurate, sadly.

It's a real shame, as God knows Britain needs to nurture its gifted genre filmmakers - but Marshall's blown what looks like a hefty budget on what is essentially a guided tour of his favourite DVDs (he's too young to have caught most of his inspirations in the cinema). Even the nudge-nudge naming of minor characters after John Carpenter and George Miller is a straight lift from Escape From New York, which has equivalents named Romero and Cronenberg.

To be fair, it has one or two mildly witty touches that aren't a complete lift from elsewhere (the cannibalistic Scottish spin on Max Max Beyond Thunderdome being my favourite), but they're few and far between. It's comfortably his worst film, and I enjoyed the first two.

[colinr0380]

He's not Bela Tarr, but at least he's not Paul WS Anderson or Marcus Nispel either. His Pop B-Movies so far have at least felt like the genuine article.

Having watched Doomsday over the weekend I certainly left with a feeling that I'd gotten my money's worth from the film! It is certainly closer in tone to the black comedy of Dog Soldiers than the darker Descent. While obviously in no way original it felt like a respectful tribute to its sources than just a rip off! Even the exact same John Carpenter font was used for the titles (along with the Escape From...-esque "London, NOW" caption!)

It was great fun ticking off all the references: the 28 Days Later virus, Escape From... walled cities, the opening scenes at the barricades reminiscent of Resident Evil: Apocalypse, in fact the ass-kicking girl super soldier and the army team (with sympathetic black commanding officer) put together to help her felt like a tribute to Reisdent Evil, a Nightmare City style infected rampage, the armoured car wreck felt like it came from the Dawn of the Dead remake (with a tribute to the female driver of Dead Reckoning from Land of the Dead!), the medieval seque that turned the film into Excalibur crossed with Monty Python (!), a Witchfinder General torture sequence of a pretty girl, a decapitation against a door that tops the similar one from The Grapes of Death (with a very funny pay off later on in the car chase!), and the final sequence that begins with a police car chase similar to the first Mad Max (though this time the post-apocalyptic punks are in the cop car!), before turning into a full blown reworking of Mad Max 2, and so on. There were also what seemed to be some nice tributes to old style matte painted landscapes, especially in the city scenes.

I'm not sure where the cannibal cooking scene comes from (likely the opening arena section is from Escape From New York) but it was pretty spectacular in a shocking way, and also quite funny since we have seen earlier that there are lots of cows roaming around now, so there is not really any need to practice cannibalism any more, except that people have developed a taste for it! (It would be nice if Sean Pertwee made it through a film without dying horribly just the once though!)

I liked the idea of moving backwards through time, from the futuristic and overcrowded London (reminding me of Ballard's extremely funny story "Billennium") back to the post-apocalyptic punks in the city, playing their terrible pop music that was current at the time of the virus, and then taking a steam train further back to medieval times as we reach Malcolm McDowell's castle and attempted return to feudal times. This is perhaps the funniest sequence of the whole film, especially those occasions where the seriousness of all the inhabitants, correctly dressed in clothes from the period, gets punctured by the occasional signs saying 'Gift Shop' or 'Emergency Exit' that have been left behind on the walls!

Perhaps it might have been the cute bunny rabbit shredded by automatic machine gun fire and the squashed cow earlier in the film but I kept thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail more and more as having just as much of an influence as Escape From New York and Mad Max! The scene where our main characters make their escape attempt from the medieval castle, maiming and killing their way down narrow staircases and through kitchens filled full of starled serfs with the heroic music felt strongly reimiscent of John Cleese bloodily hacking his way through the innocent and bemused bystanders in Holy Grail!

It is probably that wry, tongue in cheek humour that helps Doomsday become a fun romp and nice tribute to a whole action/horror/comedy genre. After all who can hate a film that has a scene of a bunch of men in kilts dancing the can-can?(!)

And there is even a wry political comment, as a chummy war mongering (to deflect attention from troubles at home) Prime Minister is manipulated by his thuggish Scottish aide, who eliminates the competition in order to rise to absolute power of a ruined country but eventually faces his own Escape From... downfall at the hands of modern recording equipment.

I would agree with MichaelB that it is most definitely not an original film, but given the derth of ability in recent action films, even a half decent megamixed one is better than nothing! And the liberal amount of casual blood and gore is quite refreshing after all those bloodless PG-13 films! Certainly The Descent is still the most impressive film Marshall has made, but I do admire the ambition to make an action film on this scale in Britain.

Perhaps the one aspect of the film I had trouble with was the score, which starts off in Carpenter tribute style but soon just becomes an annoying generic wall of action noise similar to the cycling score during the battle sequences of Matrix Revolutions. It is also constantly noodling away during the entire film, whatever the context, rather than feeling appropriate to particular scenes.

I suppose the lesson to be taken away from the film is this: that if there is one group of people you do not want to go feral it would be Scots! (Closely followed by Londoners!) Oh, and it would be great if the technology for bionic eyes were developed, even if I wonder at the hygiene issues involved in popping an eye out and rolling it across the floor like a marble!

[jbeall]

Wow, I wake up this morning to discover that not only does Doomsday have its own thread, but it's already on the second page! Not bad for a crap film. I like gory zombie movies as much as the next person, but this was soooooooooooooo derivative, and not in a particularly interesting way. It was just a straight-up homage to... about ten different, and better, films.

The Scots may still be barbaric, but they're metro enough not to regress into late-70s punk fashion and/or medievalism, and the whole cannibalism scene was just schizo. The scene where they lowered one character onto the hot coals as the feral woman with facial tats kept sticking her tongue out as if she wanted to fellate the crispy fellow was particularly stupid. But things got even stupider as the auto-da-fé gave way to the "feast," depicted with a series of ridiculously fast cuts that just made everything confusing.

I wanted to like this film; honestly. But as an aesthetic, "throw a lot of shit up there and see what sticks" doesn't really work.