Doomsday

Lacking any sense of proportion, common sense, and higher filmmaking ambition, Neil Marshall commits the craziest cinematic theft on the m2 film box. But he also damn well entertains us for a hundred minutes, lecturing at the High School of Grindhouse in a latex suit, punk haircut, and sword in hand, in a distinguished British style. Hopefully someone will attend the class and learn something. (07/05/2008)

Utter guilty pleasure. Neil Marshall said “sod everything” and put together a relentlessly entertaining tour into the world of computer games and B-movie post-apocalypse without any pretensions other than delivering a deluge of bloody, playful and often unpredictable attractions. Everything starts with the expected generic variation of the zombie subgenre, but the story soon turns into a straightforward badass reflection of declining pop-culture, with a punk cannibal evening in the style of Mad Max that alternates with medieval locations and insane car chases. And our guide through all this unleashed creative nonsense is the incredibly sexy Rhona Mitra – watching her is itself an analytical delight. The editing is a bit too frantic perhaps, but it rarely becomes an obstacle to clarity and Marshall’s narrative dynamics, which I have never enjoyed more. After a second screening I’m giving it 4* and I’m putting Rhona as my desktop background. (19/01/2020)

It's as if Neil Marshall is making fun of the whole world. He's got a lot more money than he's used to and he's totally off the rails. There's a lot of gloriously uncompromising violence, badass one-liners, and a perfectly cracking atmosphere. It has its charms and you can tell it doesn't take itself seriously at all, but unless you grew up on Escape from New York and watch Mad Max twice a year, it's probably not going to work for you. The editing could be less chaotic. (03/04/2008)

The descendants of William Wallace (aka Mel Gibson) and Mad Max (Gibson again, yuck, shame on you Mel!) in a version for 2035 dance a C-grade cancan at the Grindhouse club accompanied by the A-grade rhythm of “Známky punku" (Signs of Punk) by Czech punk band Visací zámek (Padlock). And I join in with Marshall and his crazed pogoing. I as keen as a little kid who’s going to meet Sponge Bob for the first time. The supposedly confused editing didn’t bother me (unlike The Descent) and so I would only fault the needlessly long foreplay to the crazy ride that starts at the precise moment when the first punk Mohawk appears. So don’t spit in this punk-rocker’s face, every movie appeals to somebody’s taste. And let’s hope Doomsday will appeal to enough people for Neil to attract some further projects to the future. It would be a shame to lose him, especially if he gave us more five-star sequences like the forty minutes from escaping from the platform through the adaptation of Twain’s Yankee from Connecticut to King Arthur’s court, all the way to the ending car chase in the Bentley. (20/07/2008)

Neil Marshall is a master of trash who delights in original variations on subgenres and categories to such an extent that it’s astonishing that someone would give him money for it. From today’s perspective, however, that is no longer true. To a significant extent, Marshall made his living off the existence of the hungry global DVD market, which secured him fame in certain circles. Following the collapse of the DVD market, Marshall, like many other genre barbarians, found refuge in television, where he accepted the role of a mere wage-earning craftsman. Doomsday remains his most unhinged and most entertaining film. Despite the obviously limited budget, he amazingly unleashed his combination of genres and local sentiment, thus creating the ultimate trash flick in ultra-British attire. The odyssey to find a vaccine against a deadly virus takes viewers through a full range of genres, which are proudly combined with British elements, motifs and actors. In individual parts of the film, we identify the attributes of zombie movies, spy flicks and cyberpunk. The post-apocalyptic world gradually transitions from allusions to Carpenter’s Escape from New York to Cameron’s Aliens before resting for a moment in a Mad Max style enhanced by elements of punk concerts, so that it can travel by train a la Harry Potter to the magically Arthurian landscape of the highlanders. In addition to the casting of British faces with domestic genre icons Malcolm McDowell and Bob Hoskins at the fore, the film maintains throughout its runtime a certain British punk exaggeration reflected in, among other things, the regular incorporation of elements that relate to the contemporary world of film, whether the collection plates of the Mad Maxian cannibals or the direction signs of the medieval castle tour. However, Marshall did not have a bottomless budget, so he tried to use frantic camerawork and editing to conceal compromises in the set design and deficiencies in the choreography and other phases of scene preparation. Even though that is extremely annoying, in the end it works in the overall meta-trash concept, for which nothing is sacred except for unbridled entertainment and the ethos of Junktown. (22/11/2020)