Neil Marshall 2008
A British tale of Hadrian’s wall, mounted with automatic machine guns to massacre blood-puking plague zombies, crossed by a pneumatic one-eyed babecop to find a barking mad Malcolm Macdowell in a post-apocalyptic Scotland full of mutant punks. Sight and Sound must have loved it.
What surprised me was the sheer scale of thievery involved. Doomsday kicks off by nicking the frenzied mob of start of 28 Days Later, body swerves into the boat assault from The Usual Suspects, date-rapes the concept of Escape From New York (via The Thick of It: the George Romero version) before carving the nuts off the APC scenes from Aliens, hangs the torture scene from Lethal Weapon from a meathook, then devours the charred flesh of a kind of bovver-booted Cirque du Soleil. Then things get really weird, with crazy-eyed cheque-casher Malcolm MacDowell popping up as a kind of mad scientist Sheriff of Nottingham. Then it’s into pedal to the metal for a ludicrous jaunt down Mad Max 2’s wreckage-strewn motorway before a final look at Alistair Campbell’s version of Downfall – followed by an ending nicked from The Dark Knight Returns.
Sounds fun, right? It kind of is, although it lacks the killer final punch of really gobsmacking moments or laugh-out-loud one-liners. Rhona Mitra’s copper carries the show as Lara Croft & Snake Plissken’s little girl taking on a series of mohicanned cannibal Frank Begbies to a soundtrack of ’80s bombast. A surprisingly committed cast, including Bob Hoskins and Alexander Siddig, seem to have convinced themselves they’re doing Chekov, which gives the unbridled bloodletting and profligate head-lopping a certain grand guignol crunchy grandeur. And yet, unbelievably, it could have done with being even more bonkers.
