Doom actually lasts a lot longer than one day in Doomsday
Scantily clad women. Sword fighting. Bionic eyeballs. Automated sentry turrets blasting bunny rabbits for fun. Armoured knights with bows and lances. High-tech tanks with machine guns and “foam grenades.” Scottish cannibals driving barbed-wire-wrapped death-mobiles. Sure you’ve seen this all before but come on… is there anything on this list that you’re actually tired of?
Doomsday (2008) got ignored when it came out probably because it shamelessly rips off Escape From New York (1981) the Mad Max trilogy Gladiator (2000) The Warriors (1979) and dozens of equally awesome flicks. Hey if you’re going to steal steal from the best.
Things start at a full run with Scotland getting shot to pieces by high-tech riot cops because of a “reaper virus” outbreak. Humanity is pooched if this germ gets out so the U.K. walls off the entire country and leaves everybody inside to rot. Just before they slam the gates shut though a cute little girl loses an eye in the scuffle and gets put on a chopper to safety.
Thirty years later that one-eyed girl has grown up to be the extremely hubba-hubba-some Rhona Mitra as Eden Sinclair an ass-kicking special forces operative. She’s got a bionic eye that she can take out and roll down hallways if she wants to get a spinny floor-level look at whatever the eyeball ends up pointing at. The quarantined area hasn’t been explored in decades and everybody assumes that it’s full of germy corpses. But when the reaper virus hits London the Prime Minister ( Deep Space Nine ’s Alexander Siddig) agrees to send his best action hero into the heart of Glasgow to look for a cure to the plague. Imagine if Snake Plissken were a hot British woman with a posh accent and you’re up to speed.
So do they send the heroine in alone and unprotected just like they always do in these movies? Of course not ? that would be foolish. She’s got a bunch of soldiers and two tanks going with her. Mind you her team gets decimated by mohawk-wearing cannibal punks almost immediately. It seems that Scotland isn’t as dead as everyone thought and the survivors are either horse-riding knights in a feudal society (complete with castles) or screaming punk maniacs with leather pants and spiky kneepads. The latter group cooks and eats one of Eden’s teammates while their leader prances around to “Good Thing” by the Fine Young Cannibals flanked by pole dancers and passing out picnic plates to the jubilant crowd. Meanwhile Eden escapes from her jail cell by sword fighting the leader’s hot tattooed girlfriend.
Next Eden speeds off to a medieval castle and fights some dudes in full plate armour. Once she gets away from them she steals the fastest most expensive car in Scotland (a 2008 Bentley Continental GT) and tears off down the road. She’s pursued by the Glasgow cannibal brigade all driving the requisite apocalypse buses all covered with saw blades razor wire guns and vulgar graffiti.
This movie is so full of cool shit that I’m amazed that it isn’t better known. Sure it’s not original but does that really matter when there’s an axe fight or an exploding dune buggy or a splattery decapitation every nine seconds?
