How's your tolerance level for guts?
Fans of pulped organs and technicolor brain matter are bound to like Doomsday, an apocalyptic vision of the future where a killer virus rules and everybody needs a tourniquet.
The story opens in the very near future -- like, next month -- with a revolting virus attacking most of Glasgow, which seems fairly redundant. As people all over Scotland bust out in pustules and projectile-vomit blood (and their lungs, and a wee bit of lunch; you wanted to know), the country is sealed off behind massive steel doors and the Scots are isolated and left to die en masse.
People riot and expire in the streets. A woman begs the soldiers to airlift her little daughter to safety, and they agree.
Then the story fast-forwards to the year 2035 in London, England, and our little girl refugee is a grown-up army major (played by Rhona Mitra). We meet Major Eden Sinclair as she blows away a few bad guys in the bleak, damp, rotten urban landscape that is England in the future.
As it happens, the killer virus has resurfaced in England, and the Major and her team have a special assignment -- return to Scotland, and find out how the survivors there beat the virus in the first place. Have they found a cure? The major and her fighters get their special suits and weapons and prepare to go through the wall to Scotland, the first to enter the country in more than 25 years.
What they find when they arrive is a desolate and bleak countryside, with remnants of the dead lying everywhere. Soon enough, they are under attack by banshee-like survivors, who are all Mad Max crazy in their punkish/Goth attitude and clothing. What gives with that?
Anyway, these Mohawk people swing clubs and bash heads, and the Major and her crew fire back. Plenty of blood splatter later, and the army folk are captured. Some are cooked and eaten at a huge gathering, where there is metal music and violent entertainment of every sort -- nice to see Glasgow hasn't changed in 27 years. The army folk fight back, eventually leading to forests and castles and Malcolm McDowell in a cameo as a megalomaniac.
It's exhausting.
Doomsday has bad language, murderous action and plenty of tension and cliffhanger action. It also has the odd hint of humour and even a close-up of a furry little rabbit being blown to furry little bits by bullets. Seriously.
The acting is better than adequate, and Rhona Mitra is very good as the jaded heroine. As loud, relentless, chaotic, brutally violent and gory B-movies go, this one is a keeper. What are you waiting for?
(This film is rated 18-A)
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