Doomsday

According to the bible, "ye know neither the day nor the hour" when the end shall come. Civilization could perish in the rising sea levels of global warming, the explosion of a supervolcano under Yellowstone park, a bird flu pandemic, and, maybe, just maybe, a zombie uprising. One thing is for certain: if Hollywood is to be believed, whoever survives the apocalypse will be wearing a mohawk an assless chaps. Neil Marshall's Doomsday takes its visual cues from a bevy of earlier, better films about the end of the world. The mascara-wearing biker punks seem to have stepped directly off of the set of a Mad Max sequel, maybe after a stop off with the folks from Escape from New York.

The recycling don't stop with the costumes and set direction. The plot, characters and action set pieces are all lifted wholesale from previous entries in the End Times cinema pantheon. For ease of use, the all cliches have been highlighted. In the near future, Scotland has been quarantined for a generation to prevent the spread of a deadly, highly contagious virus. When the same virus breaks out in London, a hotshot loner cop who plays by her own rules (Rohna Mitra) is ordered by corrupt and untrustworthy government officials to lead a ragtag crew of military misfits into Scotland in search of a cure. Once there, she is captured and tortured by a gang of Sex Pistols concertgoers, and is eventually forced to fight to the death before a crowd of cheering spectators.

Beyond the distractingly derivative formula, there's some annoyingly good stuff in Doomsday: annoying because it makes it impossible to write the movie off completely. Marshall, who directed The Descent, one of the best horror films of the past twenty years, knows how to put together an action sequence that is faced paced while still being coherent. (Michael Bay, take notes) There are moments of deadpan humor and cheekily irreverent gore that stay with you. One scene in particular; a combination barbeque pit/mosh pit celebration put on by the aforementioned Sex Pistols concertgoers, reaches delirious heights of tastlessness and hysteria. The themes of plague, urban overcrowding and government indifference are all off-the-moment, but the movie doesn't stay in one place for long enough for any of these things to really sink in. Instead, the film skips from one uninspired scene to another before ending with an arbritary car chase climax straight out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Doomsday shows a few flashes of the visual deftness that made The Descent an instant classic, but most of the running time wishing Lord Humungus or Master Blaster would show up and kill everybody.