ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

SCOTLAND has proved a versatile location down the years, standing in for everything from early 20th century New York in House Of Mirth to the picturesque route for the Hogwarts express in the Harry Potter films. Now, South Africa doubles for the Scottish Highlands in futuristic horror thriller Doomsday. It’s the blazing sunshine and long stretches of open motorway that give the game away.

Doomsday is the latest creation from Neil Marshall, the maker of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. It is an ambitious but wildly overplotted homage to cult 1980s fantasy films like Mad Max and Escape From New York in which logic and good taste appear to have been discarded along the way.

The story begins as a deadly plague sweeps through Glasgow. Soon, the whole of Scotland has been placed under quarantine, a steel wall is erected and the population is left to die.

Thirty years later the Reaper virus returns and threatens to wipe out the population of London. It also becomes clear that there are survivors alive and well on the streets of Glasgow. Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) and a crack SAS-team are sent on a do-or-die mission into Scotland to find a possible cure.

The first thing they encounter is a tribe of feral punks with an appetite for human flesh. And that’s just the start of their problems.

Doomsday unfolds at a breathless pace, filling the screen with death-defying escapes, non-stop action and some extremely nasty violence that is not for the squeamish. It operates on the level of a soulless computer game or a cartoon. The flaws are some desperately clunky dialogue, cardboard characters and a hectic story that makes precious little sense. Even fans of blood and gore might consider this a disappointment

Director: Neil Marshall
Cast: Rhona Mitri, Bob Hoskins, Adrian Lester, Sean Pertwee, Malcolm McDowell, Martin Compston
Screenwriter: Neil Marshall
Certificate: 18
Running time: 109 mins
Country: UK

Year: 2007

© Allan Hunter, 2008