Doomsday is a gleefully derivative post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie, written and directed by Neil Marshall (director of Dog Soldiers and The Descent).In the present day, after an outbreak of deadly killer face-rot in Glasgow, Scotland as a whole is walled off and the general population left to... well... rot. The rest of the world thinks this is going a little too far, and respond by turning their backs on Britain as whole. On the last helicopter out of Scotland is a little girl who's just taken a bullet to the face, given to the custody of soldiers by her desperate mother...Fast forward to 27 years later, and that little girl has grown up to be Major Eden Sinclair, eyepatch-wearing badass cop. Which is fortunate, because the Reaper Virus has arrived in London, and the evil government is ready to send a team of soldiers north of the border in the hope of finding a cure. Eden has 46 hours to get to Glasgow, find the man who was working on a cure before the wall went up, and save the day.Too bad the surviving population of Scotland are not feeling particularly fond of the nation that abandoned them...
Contains examples of:
Action Girl: Eden Sinclair. Kick-boxing sharp-shooting one-eyed badass.
Alas, Poor Yorick: Done by Sol, who reattaches Viper's head to her corpse and sits her in the passenger seat.
The Apunkalypse: After The Virus, Scotland's walled off and everyone reverts to their tribal, punkish roots.
Badass: Aside from Eden, there's Sergeant Norton, a quietly competent professional... who fist-fights his way through an entire castle full of armed mooks, punching faces and snapping necks. Then shoots the last man, just to show he could.
Bathing Beauty: some unnamed blonde chick in a bathtub that has a shot gun.
Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Goes a lot faster if you remember to bring along a very large axe. Whack!
Evil Chancellor: Chancellor Canaris, who cheerfully plans to allow the Reaper virus to ravage the general populace in order to reduce overpopulation.
Every Car Is a Pinto: Well, except the Bentley. There's a Transit van that explodes after hitting a downed motorbike and a caravan that's engulfed in a ball of flame after being hit by a gimp-wielding tricycle.
Eye Scream: The film starts with a small girl getting her eye shot out. Later, during the car fight, the now-adult girl starts pushing her attacker's eye in to fight him off.
Eye Spy: A cybernetic version is used by Sinclair for covert ops and nailing Canaris for attempted mass murder.
Fanservice: The first action sequence features a random nude woman. With a shotgun. Then about halfway through the film come the strippers, and for some reason all the punks have this strange aversion to being fully clothed in Scotland...
Well, maybe that's global warming for you. It does take place in 2030-something...
Freeze Frame Bonus/Shout Out: In the underground bunker, just as one of the characters says "What were they keeping in here, the Lost Ark?", the camera shows a momentary flash of a wooden crate with a stencil that says "TOP SECRET — ARMY INTEL 9906753 — DO NOT OPEN", last seen in the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark
Genre Shift: The film is advertised as a serious "after the plague" story kind of in the same vein as 28 Days Later, and plays it straight for about a half hour. Then we're off to over the top Mad Max land with an overnight in Live Action Role Play castle.
Have a Nice Death: The movie's establishing raid sequence includes, among other things, Eden shooting a hot naked chick dead in her bathtub...THROUGH THE CERAMIC.
Made of Explodium: Eden drives a Bentley clean through a bus. Which explodes. And then a severed head flies out of the explosion and hits the camera.
Moe Greene Special: Young Eden. This is how and why she has an eyepatch and a cybernetic eye.
Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer lets on that this is an after-the-plague serious film. It only takes a half an hour of watching the film when you can check off every scene you saw in the trailer and things just get downright silly.
Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Lots, but the ultimate example is probably the cannibal punk Glaswegian strippers. Pole dancing to "Good Thing".
Rule of Cool: Cyber-eyed badass, foam grenades, "Good Thing", cannibal BBQ, medieval castle in the future, random Bentley having a car chase with punk-built mutant cars and then the punks climb on the Bentley and fight while everyone's still driving, Made of Explodium, nude chick with shotgun, exploding bunny, random gimp, the Gimpmobile!◊, a severed head crashing into the camera, and the cyber-eyed badass going back to Glasgow and becoming the cannibal punk's leader by tossing their former leader's aforementioned severed head in front of them and telling them "If you're hungry, try a piece of your friend". And just about everything else in between those moments.
Schizo Tech: Knights in armour, longbows, steam trains, Mad Max-inspired death machines, APCs, video camera glass eyes, sword fights...
One group of survivors intentionally threw out all modern tech, and the other group doesn't have the means to reproduce the now-broken technology.
According to the director, this was the inspiration for the movie. He got a picture in his head of a medieval knight attacking a futuristic agent with gun and tried to figure out how to work that scene into a movie.
Suspiciously Apropos Music: The cannibal gang party before they feast is set to music of the Fine Young Cannibals.
This Is Gonna Suck: Eden, unarmed and unarmoured, is shoved into an arena and finds herself facing a heavily armed seven-foot monster in full plate armour. Her reaction? A quiet, deadpan, "bollocks."
Too Dumb to Live: One of the soldiers, while sitting inside his heavily armored APC, sees a female "survivor" outside and leaves to go rescue her, despite Eden warning him several times not to. The survivor turns out to be an infected punk, who promptly sneaks behind him and slits his throat when he isn't looking.
Waif-Fu: While Rhona Mitra is not exactly a waif, she pummels her way through a lot of much larger opponents throughout the film, including a seven-foot killer in full plate armour.
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