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Doomsday

“I just don’t need none of that Mad Max bullshit.”

-Modest Mouse

Anyone who reads these reviews with anything resembling consistency knows that when it comes to movies about the apocalypse, I’m a big fan. It’s like porn for the soul. Porn for my soul, to be exact. But with porn, like everything else, there are good examples and bad examples. Doomsday looks like a bad example.

A truly bad example. Some catastrophic virus wipes out most of humanity (or maybe just Europe—these trailers can be so vague sometimes) and 25 years later, just when it would appear that everything’s under control after the infected were fenced off and left to die, the virus comes back! Time doesn’t heal all wounds? What a premise! Shit almighty!

But wait! After that suspenseful 25 years, some damn fool opens the gate separating the virus from the uninfected, containment fails and all hell breaks loose. There’s a group of survivors somewhere in what I like to call The Scary Zone. In the trailer they call it the Hard Zone, but I can’t take a damn thing in this trailer seriously aside from that few-second ass shot of the chick who used to be on Boston Legal, so I’m debating making shit up at this point. Like the Lawrence Olivier cameo, the flying Cadillac or the saxophone guns, with which improvised breakneck solos hold more firepower and do more damage than Sherman tank rounds.

So the whole 28 Days Later or zombie-movie-in-general angle has had a hole dry-humped into its thigh and a few layers of skin flayed away. But what else to rape and pillage? Hold up! Post-apocalypse? Dystopian hell? Let’s rip off cyberpunks and roving gangs of freaks who’d kill you as soon as look at you—and probably will! And Malcolm McDowell can be their leader, because he basically hasn’t done anything worth wiping your ass with since A Clockwork Orange. Yeah, he’s an all around sinister and creepy guy who can spew poorly-written venom with the worst of them! Let the straight-to-video embarrassment flow!

Then Doomsday decides to rip off Escape From New York, stick the singer from Prodigy in there and make Boston Legal look generally all business and even more constipation as she delivers dialogue out of Cheaters episodes with bad posture and even worse range. Bob Hoskins shows up for a paycheck, and if I ever do see this movie I will not do so without at least a case of the cheapest beer I can find in me, and the worst outlook I can muster.

Next: Drillbit Taylor

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