Rather than provide our regular review of this steaming pile of putrid waste passed off as a movie, I’m kicking off this review with my own abbreviated version of the plotline for your amusement:

Spoiler Alert: By reading the following you are totally spoiling the movie. But seriously, you really shouldn’t watch this crap anyway.

Doomsday tells the story of an unfortunate British actor who mistakenly signs up as the lead character in what will become the worst massacre of an homage movie ever attempted. The beautiful and extremely fit ex-Lara Croft Rhona Mitra plays Major Eden Sinclair, orphaned when her native Scotland is ravaged by the horrendous and Ebola like Reaper virus. As the Scots perish the government decides the best solution to curb the pandemic is to build a wall that literally shuts the virus in. Rather than simply leaving the production at this point, Mitra stays on and her character Sinclair becomes a military specialist with inhuman fighting abilities and a remote controlled prosthetic camera eye. Which would be interesting if there was any point to it. But there is none. Sinclair is hired by the British Prime Minister (played by Dr. Julian Bashir who aparently found a time machine in Deep Space Nine) through acriminal political right-hand-man and her mentor Bob Hoskins. The task? It seems some Scots survived the isolation and are still roaming the desolate streets of Edinsburgh. Naturally Bashir wants to find them and an epidemiologist who were left behind so he can use them to find a cure for the Reaper virus that has mysteriously reappeared in the London slums.

Read on for the whole story and our thoughts…

Once over the wall, Eden Sinclair and her cohorts are met by the members of the Scottish Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome Fan Club who bought the entire production warehouse from the film including bad hair, retrofitted cars and blatant stupidity on eBay. Fortunately Doomsday’s low budget didn’t allow for live weapons training so instead the acting troupe – undoubtedly angered at being tricked into appearing in this “movie” – turn to the next logical means of weaponry: Molotov cocktails and medieval clubs. One would think that with their 21st century machine guns and two tanks Sinclair and her merry companions would be able to ward off these F-list stand-ins, but it seems the budget didn’t allow for proper weapons training for them either: They spend all their ammo shooting blindly at walls and cars mowing down only a handful of their attackers before running off leaving everything useful behind.

In true military fashion Sinclair lets herself be captured along with one of her men. While Chandler, the leader of the Mad Max Fan Club (played by Rick Warden), tortures her by pouring stale beer in her hair, her companion is roasted on a fire and served to the angry actors who have now turned cannibalistic (which makes sense seeing as going out of the city to catch some of the thousands of cows the Major and her tanks got stuck in a gigantic herd of earlier in the movie would be way too much work). I’m guessing the captured army officer was actually the head of the British Screen Actor’s Guild and the crew ate him to demonstrate to the world just how much they hated being in this movie.

Anyway, unsurprisingly Sinclair escapes, behands and beheads Chandler’s face-tattooed girlfriend Viper, and runs away with a fellow prisoner who just happens to be the daughter of the doctor she is looking for. Convenient. Oh, and it turns out Chandler is the doctor’s son. So he locked his own sister in the dungeon… Is it just me or is this starting to look like the plot line for some crappy German S&M flick?

After escaping without a scratch the two women make their escape on a steam powered locomotive along with the two remaining members of the team. After a 30 second trek through the Scottish highlands and a trip through an abandoned fallout shelter filled with boxes of unknown content that couldn’t possibly be useful to anyone, they are captured by the the Scottish branch of the International Lord of the Rings Fan Club. Since they are Scottish they skimped out and bought props from Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves and holed up in a tourist attraction castle complete with “Souvenir Shop” signs and other medieval paraphranalia. How very post-apocalyptic. At the throne we meet Maclom McDowell who, pissed off at not becoming the world’s most famous and influential actor after his amazing performance in A Clockwork Orange, decided the best way to prove his worth was to pick up the worst roles his agent could dredge up and mail in performances that make my hamster’s portrayal of Sleeping Beauty worthy of an Oscar.

In accordance with the Official Rulebook of Medieval Movie Reenactments a gladiator scene follows in which Sinclair (smartly dressed in riding boots, yoga pants and a tank top) is pitted against The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Shockingly the knight manages to slightly scratch her before having his head cracked opened. Which is followed by an explosion. I won’t go into the details here but somehow the team realize they’ve been carrying around explosives this whole time and the intrepid quartet manage to blast their way to an escape.

With Robin Baggins and his merry friends hot on their heels they make their way to a fallout shelter. One of those crates must surely contain the perfect weapon against angry and underpaid Scottish actors armed with clubs and longbows, right? And *cue angelic reveal music* there it is: A brand new sparkling Bentley!

Luckily Bentley was looking for someone to shoot their next commercial so why not kill two birds with one stone? After all, nothing makes your luxury sports car look better than a street race against discarded props from a 1980’s post-apocalyptic movie.

The new Bentley makes it’s way across the Scottish highlands with the crazed Mad Max Fan Club hot on it’s heals. Without a scratch. Even though it literally drives straight through several exploding vehicles. Guess those new force fields and self healing body and paint work really are worth the money. Fortunately for the financiers, all the stunt coordinators had left the set in protest at this point and the jury rigged Mad Max vehicles loaded with propane tanks and gas blow up one after another leaving the mangled bodies of the actors splattered across the camera crews and the accountants crossing out names on the payee lists.

To cap off the story Sinclair hands over King Malcom’s beaten and downtrodden daughter to the hugely corrupt statesman (who almost certainly rigged the entire pandemic as some form of large-scale downsizing operation) and returns to her home in the ravaged city of Edinburgh. Here she returns the head of Chandler to the remaining actors (to much applause) and meets up with her mentor Bob Hoskins who proves once again why he should never be cast in any movie ever again.

If you like, have ever seen or ever want to see Mad Max, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend, Aeon Flux, Lara Croft – Tomb Raider, Resident Evil or any of the other flicks this movie “borrows” from, don’t bother with Doomsday: It’ll ruin the experience completely.

It seems disaster movies in which large portions of the population are killed by rabid viruses and/or famous world capitals are ruined in apocalyptic splendor has become a milking cow for movie makers across the world. To cash in on this trend writer/director Neil Marshall (of The Decent shame fame) has come up with this cinematic mash-up that combines apocalyptic pandemic horrors with hot and dark heroine movies. The result is a sour tasting porridge that smacks more of blatant rip-off than artistry and drags along at a pace that makes watching CNN’s coverage of the lead-up to the democratic convention seem like a heart pounding sprint.

Let me just cover the good part (yes, “part” – singular) before I rip this huge waste of time and money to shreds: Considering the poor quality of nearly every aspect of this movie, Rhona Mitra singlehandedly carries it on her extremely fit shoulders. With what Angela referred to as an “extremely uneven bob” and a body you normally only see in computer games like Tomb Raider, she is nice to look at and her acting is interesting enough to keep you watching. Without Mitra, this DVD would never have been played to the end.

Doomsday is littered with bad music from other movies (most notably one track from Godspeed, You Black Emperor – the band that created the haunting musical landscapes of 28 Days Later is repeated ad nauseum) and plot lines that make absolutely no sense. Throughout the dreadfully long 1 hour and 45 minutes questions like “how did the guy with the train know they were coming?” and “how come they didn’t look for weapons in the fallout shelter?” kept popping up. The whole movie was littered with untold and unexplained plot lines that made absolutely no sense and this combined with bad acting, poorly executed stunts, crappy visual effects and dreadful pacing made the whole experience so underwhelming I’m tempted to demand a refund.

Morten’s Take: This movie proves that although mash-ups occasionally work in music they have no place in movies – especially if the director is incompetent.

Angela’s Take: I thought this was about fighting mutants, not medievals from The Lord of the Rings.