Doomsday
Blu-ray edition
Directed by Neil Marshall
Starring Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Alexander Siddig, Adrian Lester, Sean Pertwee
Rated R
Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Release Date: July 29, 2008

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the concept of the Guilty Pleasure, right? It’s something that we like because of its faults and in spite of ourselves. If you were to ask me what my biggest Guilty Pleasure when it comes to motion pictures, my simple and stately three word answer would be Bride of Chucky.

Come on now… Dolls fucking each other? That’s the cinematic equivalent of Ben and Jerry’s, man. Good for the soul but bad for the body.

Now there are Guilty Pleasures and then there are GUILTY FUCKING EPIPHANIES! The former entail that you like a movie but don’t say so around certain people like your parents or the friends of that girl you’re trying to date. You know, the ones who like Animal Collective and wear tweed ironically and listen to NPR even though that one simple act is like listening to nails on a board, only underwater. Those people will look at you funny if you say you liked the movie where John Ritter got “Pinheaded.”

But the latter? The GUILTY FUCKING EPIPHANY!? It knows no sense of decorum. You tell your parents you love a GUILTY FUCKING EPIPHANY! You tell your Rabbi you like a GUILTY FUCKING EPIPHANY! even though you ain’t Jewish. And those friends of the girl you’re trying to date? You actually start a fight with them if they say negative word one about your GUILTY FUCKING EPIPHANY! And you will so fucking win against some NPR listening hipster anyway, as they’re most likely vegan, and scrawny as all hell.

So needless to say, Doomsday is a GUILTY FUCKING EPIPHANY!

It’s your standard End-Of-The-World Boilerplate. In 2008, a virus breaks out in Scotland. It can’t be cured, so they build a huge wall on the Scotland/Britain border. The healthy stay on the English side to get rich and snooty. The sick stay on the Scottish side, where they eat all the food before they start eating each other, and they fall prey to savage violence and even worse fashion choices.

So yeah, Doomsday is COMPLETELY FICTIONAL!

Anyway, the virus strike sin England again after thirty years, and the government sends their biggest badass, Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) to go over the wall and find the one renegade doctor who might have a cure (Malcolm McDowell). The gangs of Post-Apocalyptic Punk-Cannibals roaming Scotland ensure it will not be easy.

Where Doomsday differs from all the other crap is in the presentation. The writer/director of this little lark is Neil Marshall. His past efforts include Dog Soldiers, which is the only decent werewolf movie released since the eighties. They also include The Descent, which is a film (and my myspace friends will tell you this) that I legally married at the end of 2006.

So what we have here is less a movie and more a laundry list of Marshall’s influences. We go from Night of the Living Dead to Escape From New York to Excalibur to Mad Max. And normally this would piss me off, except that Doomsday differs in one key respect…

Usually when you have some crack-shitstain trying to relive his childhood on film (like Eli Roth, for example), what we’re stuck with is a bunch of loosely collected homages strung together in a cynical attempt to show us that the director has good (or at least distinct) taste with a showy “I’m-Above-All-This-And-I-Can-Do-Better” flair. Marshall doesn’t want to do “homages.” There isn’t a cynical frame in Doomsday‘s wildly bloody 113 minute running time. He wants to make a movie EXACTLY LIKE THE ONES HE SAW WHEN HE WAS A KID! And that kind of unbridled enthusiasm comes out in the film, and it becomes a virtue instead of a self-indulgent vice.

Oh, and if you’re as deeply misanthropic as I am, all the blood and guts to be found in this movie will treat you damned fine. And they’re almost all practical too, showing a loving, home-made charm that you just can’t find any more.

Another way that Doomsday shows its ass in the vein of John Carpenter is that it also has a broad idealistic streak. It tends to show the cannibalistic punks in a better light than the English bureaucracy, kinda like how Escape From New York liked it’s Manhattan Island punks more than it did the President’s advisors. It lends a Bedlam appeal that I like quite a bit, what with the hoping one dies before one gets old. The Glasgow Cannibals certainly are entertaining… And their barbeques are a fucking hoot.

And yeah, I’d mention the acting if I could remember it, and yeah the writing is better than a movie like this deserves, but if you got past “Scottish Punk-Cannibals” while still wanting to know how the script holds up, you’re not the target audience for this movie. Stop pretending, you’re not, go to some other site.

I don’t think I can sum it up more succinctly than “Doomsday rules, and if you don’t like it, you’re an asshole.” The only way this movie could be more fun is if the Blu-Ray case dispensed heroin and blowjobs.

DVD Bonus Features

-FEATURES ‘N’ SHIT-

Not much other than a director commentary, but what else there is segues perfectly into my Blu-Ray rant…

The Blu-Ray to Doomsday features character bios, info on the virus and behind the scenes featurettes. The problem is that these are to be accessed WHILE THE MOVIE IS STILL FUCKING PLAYING!

I love movies, and I can only assume you do as well. You better if you plunk down an ungodly sum for a Blu-Ray player, plus the thirty bucks for a disc. But has watching a movie become so lame and passe that you need ornamentation while doing it?

Used to be that when you went to the video store, you got THE FUCKING MOVIE, and now in the age of discs, it’s less about the flick that meant something to your soul and more about how it can pimp out the TV and stereo system that meant something to your checkbook.

I’m of the firm belief that extras are exactly that; EXTRAS, but now jackasses are getting discs for behind the scenes crap that wouldn’t make sense if you hadn’t seen the movie in the first place.

But I could at least understand, except ACCESSING THEM WHILE THE MOVIE’S PLAYING? This is just style over substance and form over function. It’s less about the movie and more about the machine it’s playing on.

Welcome to the Eighties.

***1/2 out of 4