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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Universal Studios
Salesrank: 27542
Released: July 29, 2008 |
| Our Price: $7.60 |
| Used Price: $1.99 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
From the director of The Descent comes an action-packed thrill-ride through the beating heart of hell! To save humanity from an epidemic, an elite fighting unit must battle to find a cure in a post-apocalyptic zone controlled by a society of murderous renegades. Loaded with ferocious fights and high-octane chases, Doomsday grabs you right from the start, and doesn't let go till its explosive end!
Description of Doomsday (Unrated Full Screen Edition):
Loud, violent, and proudly derivative, the post-apocalyptic action-thriller Doomsday is the latest from UK cult director Neil Marshall, who impressed horror fans with his previous efforts, Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Both pictures established Marshall as a director with a knack for reinventing well-worn genre pictures, but here, he seems more interested in stitching together favorite scenes and elements from established horror and science-fiction films. Escape from New York is the main source for Doomsday, though there are plenty of nods to The Road Warrior and its multitude of Italian-made carbon copies, as well as the zombie/plague subgenre; the lovely but impassive Rhona Mitra is the Snake Plissken-esque loner sent by police (represented by Bob Hoskins) to infiltrate Scotland, which has descended into anarchy following a viral outbreak. The disease has surfaced in London (now a walled city), and Mitra is dispatched to find a scientist who may possess a cure. Marshall's vision of Scotland in ruins brings together the punk/modern primitive costume design of George Miller's Mad Max trilogy with some eclectic homegrown elements (knights on horseback defending a gang leader's castle), and while these touches are novel, the picture as a whole should ring overly familiar to any viewer who's spent time in the exploitation trenches during the past 25 years. Younger and less discerning audience members will undoubtedly enjoy the plentiful violence and gore, as well as the unbridled performances of the supporting cast, especially stuntwoman/actress Lee-Ann Liebenberg as the heavily tattooed Viper. --Paul Gaita
Beyond Doomsday on DVD
More from Universal Studios | 
Doomsday on Blu-ray | 
More from Director Neil Marshall |
Stills from Doomsday (Click for larger image) Doomsday (Unrated Full Screen Edition) Reviews:
Doomsday 
2009-12-17 - Doomsday was a very fast paced action ride. It kept you right on the edge of your seat for most of the movie until the end. I thought that it had many great gore scenes. Very entertaining.
Great Flick!
2009-12-16 - I came across this movie and it is great. So I bought it. If you this futuristic/Sci-Fi you will enjoy.
A dirty gitty violent sci-fi movie 
2009-10-09 - 4 of 5 stars for this dirty gritty violent sci-fi movie. So a virus strikes forcing the world to enclose the entire country to prevent spread to the rest of the world. Ultimately a modern day great wall of China is built to secure the quarantine. It is assumed the whole population dies from the virus. Wrong! Many survive (hummm, natural immunity). After many years of stability, the virus spreads to England where the authorites decide they need to capture one of those immune people to create a cure. So, a para-military task force goes beyond the wall. They first go to a large city where they encounter a large collection of people who have gone "primative native" and attack the force. During their escape, they get linked to a different set of people who have gone "knights and castles".
This movie is very dirty and gritty. The most graphic violence that I've seen since some of those movies in the 70's. Plenty of blood, guts, bullets, body parts and dead people. Good action, good special effects, interesting plot. Worth watching, but, be warned, it is graphic!
Unashamed B-movie mayhem 
2009-10-02 - It's all been seen before, and this movie won't be the one to remember when you're discussing exploitation movies down the pub... but for all that, it does its job efficiently enough and does what it sets out to.
For the most part, what it is setting out to do seems to be to homage other movies. It's set in a future world where an incurable disease called the Reaper virus (cos it's deadly, geddit..?) has led to a Scotland completely sealed off from land, air or sea to allow the population to die without infecting anyone else. However, 25 years after the virus appeared and was contained, it has resurfaced, and a team must re-enter Scotland, to investigate recent indications of survivors, which could mean a cure is possible. The build up and plot exposition are effective, evoking some of the ideas from 28 Days Later, and the scene where the armoured cars enter Glasgow rips off the scene in Aliens with armoured car carrying the marines to the centre of the aliens nest, down to the smallest details. From Aliens, the director moves on to a Scottish variation on Mad Max's Thunderdome, as we meet the punkish degenerate subculture which has taken over the city. Finally the movie brings all the pieces together in a car chase which plays like a mixture of Bond and Mad Max via Escape from New York to a not-quite-satisfying-enough conclusion.
Rhona Mitra plays the team leader, Major Skinner, dressed in unfeasibly tight clothes to accentuate her figure for most of the movie. She does the job, but fails to really set the screen alight with the necessary charisma to make the B-movie nonsense memorable. Supporting roles are filled out with a few British cinema stalwarts - Sean Pertwee, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell and Alexander Siddig all perfom just to the level required and not much more. It's action packed, bloody and gruesome and often gratuitous, but never goes quite over the top enough to be too offensive. That is perhaps an indication of the director's intention to make a tongue in cheek apocalyptic thriller that does not take itself too seriously - and in that he has succeeded. But in using a script riddled with plot holes and unlikely conveniences, he has failed to make something unmissable - or even truly memorable.
Derivative Action from the Driector of "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent" 
2009-09-21 - Though it includes lots of shoot-outs, gores and chopped-off limbs and heads, Neil Marshall's newest film "Doomsday" comes off rather disappointing. The film is from the director who made two impressive films, "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent." Some say they are overrated, but still Neil Marshall managed to show originality and creativity in his previous works. As far as the budget goes, his latest effort has become much bigger and louder; however, "Doomsday" looks lackluster and, more importantly, derivative.
The outbreak of a deadly plague in Glasgow, with the horror of the pandemic, results in the quarantine of Scotland. No one is allowed to leave the country and the people inside the border are left abandoned. Years later, in 2035, because of another outbreak of the same disease in London, a group of soldiers led by Maj. Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) is immediately sent to Scotland, in order to find a cure.
Usually any action or horror films need suspension of disbelief, but "Doomsday" asks for it so many times. You will see the angry mob gets killed by the soldiers, but one little girl is allowed to board a chopper. Eventually all logic is abandoned in favor of reasonable, if not remarkable action and set-pieces, which can be improved with better editing and choreography.
This is the world of Mad Max and Snake Plissken. Or one that has copied them. Clearly Neil Marshall loves classic action flicks made in 70-80s - soldiers' names include "Miller" and "Carpenter." You may add to them "Hill," "Cameron" and "Boyle" perhaps. Don't get me wrong. Paying homage is not a bad thing. It is just that it doesn't necessarily mean you can dispense with a decent script and your own ideas. If your new idea is the lengthy "BBQ" stage with cancan music, you need to watch these classic films again. They may be violent, but certainly they are not boring.
"Doomsday" has so many things - car chases, street combats, one-on-one fights, tortures, gores, decapitations and even deliberate dumbness. These factors can be fun only if they are done with decent stories. The film constantly changes its rules as it moves on from one chapter to another whimsically, and then we realize that like Tarantino's self-indulgent "Death Proof," the director is actually doing what other directors did. And they did better.
