To Netflix... or not to Netflix

[jack_babalon]

Doomsday isn't so much a movie as it is a mix tape of other movies from the 80's. Keep this in mind (along with staggering amounts of weed) and you'll be able to navigate around the mine field of pot holes that comprise the landscape of the film.

The basic jist is that a deadly contagion called the Reaper Virus is ravaging the British Isles. The authorities quarantine the top half of the land and though creating a dystopian shithole of a future manage to keep the Reaper Virus checked. Until some three decades later when the disease reemerges in London. The Government then decides to send in a team of commandos and scientists to re-enter the quarantine zone, led by Aeon Flux... Ultra-Violet... the hot chick from the Resident Evil Movies... er, Rhona Mitra to find any survivors of the original outbreak in order to find a cure for the Reaper Virus.

Many fight scenes and inexplicable car chases follow (despite being isolated from civilisation for three decades there's still plenty of gasoline (and beer?) left in Scotland around for the Road Warrior sequences).

We kick things off with what might be called John Carpenters Escape from Glasgow (which admitedly would still be a hundred times better than Escape from L.A.) as the team finds that the survivors have all turned into cannibal versions of your local favorite fetish club (check out the bad guy who looks like the love child of Wattie from the Exploited and Genesis P-Orridge!). There's even a chase scene lifted straight from The Warriors where the team has to run from a gang of maruading punks to catch a train... yes they still have trains thirty years after the apocalypse! There's even a bunch of medieval knights as well led by Malcolm ("I'll be in anything if you pay me enough") McDowell. Poor old Bob Hoskins is in it as well... guess he owed someone some money. So anyway there you go... Mad Max, Excalibur, Escape from NY and a splash of 28 Days later for flavor... and viola, you have the exact movie every 13 year old American Boy wanted to make in 1986.



The Mindscape of Alan Moore has to be one of the best documentaries on a comic book writer since maybe Crumb. Alan Moore discusses everything from ceremonial magick, what makes comic books a unique medium compared to films, 'Idea Space', the role language plays in shaping human consciousness, his early years in the comic industry along with some pretty heady reflections on sex, death and shamanism.

I especially loved the little vignettes they shot of Rorshach and V (along with a recurring John Constantine figure as well) accompanied by Alan Moore reading excerpts from "V for Vendetta" and the "Watchmen".

I can safely recommend this to both fan-boys and students of the occult: As the late 80's band Pop Will Eat Itself once sang: "Alan Moore knows the score"!

Now if only we could get Alan Moore to come out with a comic book more than once every three years and we'd be good to go! I know, I know... there's no rushing genius, but watching this will make you want to unbury those old Swamp Thing and Promethea trades as you anxiously await the next LoEG.

Comments

[vomikronnoxis.livejournal.com]

I really wanted to like "Doomsday." "The Descent" was amazing and "Dog Soldiers" was pretty damn good for a werewolf movie. I'm ready for him to put something like those titles out again.

I'll have to give that Moore flick a shot, though.

~rl

[adammaker.livejournal.com]

oooh, I need to find the alan moore flick.
thank you.

[mlfoley.livejournal.com]

*must add Mindscape to his netflix queue*

[kittenspeaks.livejournal.com]

Sat up watching Alan Moore with WW this past week.
It was- without a doubt- amazing. The man is a genius...as if there was any doubt. Thanks for the loan.:-)

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

All British Actors are obligated by Equity to appear in anything that anyone asks them to be in. It's the only thing that explains Burgess Meredith in G.I. Joe: The Movie and Sir Ian McKellen in Last Action Hero.