Additionally, we've got our highest fail-o-meter score yet! Read on, my friends in fail!
This week it's DOOMSDAY!
Normally, I'd just dive right in, but everything about this movie is ....wrong. They just did it wrong. As in, needs a do-over, you got the incorrect answer wrong.
Actually, a better way to put it is (Star Wars x Mad Max) + SLC Punk + 28 Days Later + Lord of the Rings = Doomsday.
Ok, now you've got a general idea of the "plot". Raging virus takes over Scotland (I think, they never make it clear, Poke and I had to pause the movie several times to make sure we were on the same page), the world doesn't help Scotland, the only people left alive are the zombified victims, and the now-degenerate humans living in Scotland.
Before this, there is a intro scene where a mother holding her small child is running from soldiers who are simply shooting into the crowd to kill several infected people who have somehow made it through. Her child is wounded by shrapnel and loses an eye, but the mother manages to get her child to a army helicopter and hopefully save her child. CUE FAST FORWARD IN TIME!
To quarantine the deadly virus, the great people of England build a giant wall around Scotland, put up 24-hour surveillance, and install motion activated DEATH TURRETS that kill even innocent rabbits. (No joke, there is a scene of a rabbit being obliterated by a death turret)
BUT WAIT! We come to discover, in the middle of the walled up quarantine zone, is a abandoned lab which may hold the cure! A team is to be sent in to get the cure, and save the world (Scotland).
TREPIDATION! An advisor to the prime minister has other plans. Instead of getting the cure, they're just going to flood Scotland with water, and kill innocent people (zombies)!
Our heroine (the child from the intro scene, all growed up!) is introduced by a acceptable action scene on a ship, and that's about all i can grasp of it. I mean, I'm sure she is there for a reason, they just think its better to keep it a surprise! At any rate, she navigates the ship using her detachable eyeball, which doubles as a camcorder and a recon tool. She kills the bad guys, gets the necessary video for her mission, and a guy essentially gets decapitated by a shotgun blast to the head (It's important, decapitation is a important plot point).
Ok, there is some boring story "development", but the real point is, they are now sending the team into the quarantine zone. To get there safely, the team is in two APC-esque vehicles, (Poke knows a lot more about army weaponry than i do, he says they were accurate enough that i can't ridicule them) armed with futuristic weaponry, and wearing bio-suits to protect them from the virus. Now, the bio-suits are one of the most hilarious things i have seen. They are straight out of Buck Rodgers.
Seriously, it's pretty bad.
To be fair, not really that ^^^^ bad, but close- and... they called them bio-suits. Really Doomsday? Really? At any rate, now they are in the quarantine zone, and they soon find the lab. They move inside, and for a moment, it looks as though this movie could redeem itself. The aura of creepiness is there, I'm on the edge of my seat, and then... PUNKS! Yeah. Punks. Purple haired, tattoo covered, leather-wearing, blunt-weapon carrying punks. Ah, bad movies. How fast you can go from almost breaking even, right back into fail mode. Speaking of punks, I'm gonna go on a bit of a tangent here. I'm a metalhead, and we always get a bad rap. I don't have time to get into stereotypes, but we get the short end of the stick. Always. About damn time the punks had a little fun poked at them.
ANYWAY. These punks are charging out of some room and our team is in the back of the room having a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel kind of time, except for the one guy from the team who takes a blunt object to the face when he is caught by surprise.
There's an admittedly cool little scene of bad-assery where the guy with the shotgun is just stomping face, and takes out a lot of them. Not bad. His shotgun even has two flashlights. I dunno why, probably just because he's bad ass.
Now we've progressed to my favorite part of the movie. The foam grenades. Yes, everyone. Foam grenades. Essentially what happens is, the team crams into a non-working elevator. Our heroine demands the shotgun from the resident bad-ass. She says "we're going down" as she shoots the elevator cable, causing me to writhe in pain at the terrible joke. As the elevator falls, she pulls out a grenade, and you wonder, 'What can she do with that'? She pulls the pin and drops the 'nade, and there is a slow-mo sequence of it hitting the ground, and then a white foam erupts from it, filling the elevator, pushing the walls of the elevator against the elevator shaft, stopping the team on the floors below.
This is what transgressed as Poke and i watched this scene.
Me: Ah, she's asking for the shotgun. Oughta be good.
Poke: Did she say stun grenade?
Me: Yeah i think so.
Poke: So she used a stun grenade to do that? Why is everyone's ear's not bleeding from the grenade?
Me: Wait, i think she said foam grenade.
Poke: But that's not even a real thing?!
Me: *shrugs, rewinds* Yeh, she definitely says foam grenade. Yeah, look, it fills up the shaft and stops them on the floor below! Cool.
Poke: That's dumb. That wouldn't even really work.
Me: Wait, yeah. And when they all get out of the elevator, no one has foam on them!
Poke: Plus, that's like the only application I can think of for a foam grenade.
Me: Yeah, this movie is fail.
Poke: Yeah. Hey guess what?
Me: Yeah?
Poke: You're gay.
Me: No I'm not. But you like men.
Poke: Up yours. Let's finish this movie before i hate myself for watching it.
Now the team has escaped the building, they run out onto the street and head for the APCs.
A team member left back on the APCs, in all his brilliance, has brought in a young woman from outside who is infected in hopes of saving her.
Now back in the APCs, they begin driving as fast as possible, while the punks throw Molotov cocktails at them. There follows a mediocre chase scene (wait a minute, who am i kidding? it's an awful chase scene) and one of the punks ends up on top of the APC and he bashes the "bulletproof" glass of the APC open with a BRICK. APCs are meant to take a pounding, with glass that can withstand a tank round. Hmmm. Must have been a very strong brick.
Long story short, our team of heroes gets captured, a few people we never had time to care about die, an our heroine wakes up in a jail cell with a punk named Sol. Sol is bat-shit crazy. Sol is not nice. Sol beats our heroine up, gropes her, and goes Mike Tyson on her ear. And of course, because Sol is the craziest of all our resident punks, he is the leader.
The next scene is a bizarre mix of concert/circus/strip show. Apparently they have strung up one of the team members over a fire pit, and they plan to eat him. At this point the movie goes from bad to flat out disturbing, as the huge crowd of people eats his burned corpse. Seriously it's disgusting and very graphic, not for the faint of heart. Here's where i got more than a little annoyed at this movie...i understand the need to show the degeneration of society, but eating people crosses a line.
At any rate, a woman covered in tattoos to make her resemble a hawk (and is also Saul's girlfriend, as best i can tell) is introduced as a new main character, and then she heads downstairs to the prison blocks to where our heroine has freed herself and they have a short, badly choreographed sword fight, in which our hawk-lady is (you guessed it) beheaded. I was taken in complete shock (not by the loss of heads) because this hawk-lady had been treated as a new main character for five minutes, upon which she is rapidly killed off. Take a look at the movie cover, hawk-lady is featured in front of the heroine character. What!? It makes no sense, it's like hiring Brad Pitt to play an extra in a war movie!
Next the remnants of our original squad busts out of the punk compound and heads for a train in search of Kane, the operator of the abandoned lab. Kane's new base of operations is in a feudal English castle like setting, but we all know it's Lord of the Rings. The train is of course in perfect working order, and on it we meet Archer-Guy. He looks like a good replacement for Shotgun-Guy, but when they step out from Punk Land into Lord of the Ringsville, they are captured by Kane's horse riding knights, and Archer-Guy is killed almost instantaneously. What is their fetish with introducing new characters and then killing them in less than five minutes?
There's a whole bunch of attempted plot points, but really all you need to know is that our heroine is dumped into a deathmatch with Sauron...ahem, a guy in black spiky armor, she wins, they escape, and head for a cave like thing in the middle of the forest. Once in there the team opens a bunch of boxes, and in them is a Bentley Continental GT and a walky-talkie like thing. HOW CONVEINIENT! :o
They rev up the Bentley, burst out onto the abandoned highway, and head for rezendevous with the English bigwigs so they can save the world...er, Scotland.
A RIDICULOUS chase scene follows where a bunch of punks in wonderfully fast cars such as AMC Gremlins, a old busted Cadillac, and several Peugots and rally cars. Did I mention all of the cars look in poor working order, have human body parts mounted on them, and are somehow KEEPING UP WITH A BENTLEY? Seriously, the thing has 600+ horsepower, how is a old Caddy keeping up?
Oh yeah, because it has Sol in it with his dead girlfriend, and if we couldn't have them keep up, we'd be out of a story. Oh, damn.
Anyway, the good guys get away, Sol gets beheaded in the process (REALLY? AGAIN WITH THE BEHEADING MOTIF) and the Bentley drives through a old school bus full of punks and it somehow blows up, not sure how that one works, seeing as...well, whatever. I couldn't even try to explain it.
Now we are near the end, which i awaited with great anxiety. Not because I cared about the story, but because i wished to end the abusive relationship of this movie with my brain.
Our heroine delivers the cure, which is really a survivor who is immune to the disease. The cure can be made from her blood! G'HEY! We shoulda though of that before everyone turned into zombies!
After getting the bad guy's confession with her camcorder eyeball, our heroine gets back in the Bentley, scoops up Sol's head, and declares herslef the new Punk Leader.
THE END
The ending is about as abrupt as being tackled by a rhino, you don't expect it to happen, but when it does, it hurts.
No transitions, terrible acting, even worse dialog, EXCESSIVE gore, and cheesy plot points make Doomsday drunkenly stumble its way to our worst rating yet: a whopping 5.5 out of 7 failpunks.
If you intened to go against my recommendation, and watch this movie, make sure you're either among friends, drunk, or both. Otherwise, this movie will make you feel like flossing your teeth with barbed wire is a better alternative.
Till next time, everyone.
DOOMSDAY SUCKED!
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