Every time I saw the trailer I thought:

"Wow, it's a cross between Resident Evil 2 and 300!"

So you've never seen a Mad Max movie or Escape From New York, then?

Doomsday Review by Arrow at JoBlo.com

You're going there? If there is such a thing as hell on earth, that's it. – Bill Nelson

Before writing this poor excuse for a review, I went and glanced quickly at other people’s thoughts on the film. I read “rip off”, “weak story” and even caught a 0 Stars ratings (even though positive stuff about the film was stated) from some high brow douche somewhere . One thing I didn’t see though was the word FUN written anywhere. I guess my definition of amusement doesn’t gel with the one of the masses now of late, because DOOMSDAY was one of the BEST TIMES I’ve had at the movies this year!

DOOMSDAY was a B-80’s vibed Post Apocalyptic gore-show action fest but with mucho coin in its jock-strap. Think ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (right down to the anti-heroe’s eye patch) meets THE ROAD WARRIORS (the villain here even had a Mohawk). In fact, there are two characters in the flick named Miller and Carpenter. George Miller directed Road Warriors and John Carpenter of course tackled Escape from New York. So yup, DOOMSDAY was helmed by somebody who obviously knows the genre and has a deep affinity for it. The references were plentiful and for me they added to the overall enjoyment of the film. Like I always say; what some may call rip-off, others will call homage. In this case, I’m in the “others” category.

On its own, the flick was an energetic, visceral and balls to the walls ride that rarely stopped to develop its story pass the base yet alone be polite about shite. Yup, once its (déjà vu) set up established, the exploitation goodies rammed in so hard that the narrative somewhat got lost in the noise and splats. By Act 3, I was kind of cloudy as to the details behind the happenings but straight up that didn’t matter one damn bit. I was too occupied having a RIOT ACT with all the red wet messes, left field yuk-yuks and grisly bang-bangs to give a fudge. From its harsh prologue, its ALIENS-esque soldiers crash the scene and get attacked bit, to its ROAD WARRIORS –ish CGI less car chaos; DOOMSDAY put me through the fun-times ringer and I couldn’t get enough of it!

Marshalls definitely took the gloves off for this one. The gore was excessive, the humor shamelessly cruel (the more the film moved forward the funnier it got - loved that gimp-lol), the turns at times outrageous (next thing you know we're in Medieval times - gold!) and the whole merciless and relentless in its goal to kick our asses. It’s been a while that I’ve seen a film with so much balls and that wore them on its blood stained sleeve this proudly. In this day and age where a turd like AVP 2 is celebrated; yup, it was quite refreshing for this a-hole to see a movie like this one! Add to that Neil Marshall's firm and Amphetamine laced directorial style that was axed on eye popping spectacle, arresting costume/set designs and brilliant casting all around (Rhonda Mitra is now a new fav of mine) and you get an AWESOME time at the movies.

Look I love 80’s trash, I worship exploitation films, and I get-off on gore, action, guns and hot dames. That’s where I come from. DOOMSDAY gave me all that with panache, a un-pc stance and a FU attitude. Movies like this were MADE for me! THANK YOU DOOMSDAY!

ACTING:
Rhona Mitra (Eden) took her cue from Kate Becksingsale in Underworld but was more credible in the ass kicking department and for me much sexier. I was SOLD! Sean Pertwee (Dr. Talbot) did what he had to do with his usual class. Lee-Anne Liebenberg (Viper) was YUM and menacing at the same time. What a turn on! Craig Conway (Sol) stole the show with his violent and nutty performance. SOL ROCKS! Bob Hoskins (Bill) and Malcolm McDowell (Kane) did fine in their small roles. Adrian Lester (Norton) was credible, likeable and made the most of his role.
GORE:
Somebody asked for a large order of red grub with a side dish of mean spiritedness? YOU GOT IT! Pick-axe in head, severed limbs, slit throat, cut off heads, man burned alive, mucho gunshot wounds, head blasted in half by a shotgun and more!
DIRECTING:
Marshall hit this one out of the park via offering up stylish, heavy handed (loved that severed head that hit the camera) and totally wild action set pieces that floored me to the…well…floor! The atmosphere was oppressive, the pace clipped, the suspense on – no complaints on a technical standpoint. The man was on FIRE!

SOUNDTRACK:
Tyler Bates put out a layered score that fit the many moods of the film. We also get some well used ditties like Spellbound by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Club Foot by Kasabian (end credit song).
BOTTOM LINE:
The Studio obviously didn’t get DOOMSDAY (can we spell under-marketed) and today’s teens or/and general public probably won’t either. But if like me you boogie to the genre films of the 70s/80s, the B Movies that took no prisoners and that reveled in being what they were with no apologies - then this loud, brash, gleefully brutal and often bleakly hilarious opus might be for you. It's funny cause all read is complaints on the "story" - for me, I was so engulfed by the non-stop anarchy on hand that I didn't really care. To each his own I guess! One thing’s for sure, I’M THERE if there’s ever a sequel.

Doomsday Review

by Rob Gonsalves (of eFilmCritic.com)

"I love the '80s."

Horror fans may want to see "Doomsday" to check out the new film by Neil Marshall, director of "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent." I did, too, but about twenty minutes into it I decided to pretend it was a long-lost mid-’80s film Marshall had dusted off and put his name on.
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, especially for aficionados of cheesy post-apocalyptic fare. Doomsday has it all: a deadly virus, a laconic hero (in the shapely form of Rhona Mitra), a mission with a short deadline, a cadre of savages who take their sartorial cues from the Sex Pistols, and a lengthy desert auto chase. Like Dog Soldiers, similarly a stew of genres Marshall loves, Doomsday is a place for Marshall to try on various hats.

In this case, he also worships at the altar of John Carpenter (Escape from New York) and George Miller (the Mad Max films). If you’ve been craving a new Snake Plissken movie or a new Mad Max adventure, only with a Kate Beckinsale lookalike in the lead, Doomsday is what you need. The strongly Carpenter-esque synth score, occasionally interrupted by ‘80s Brit-pop (I particuarly enjoyed hearing Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes” in the midst of the climactic chase), seals the deal. Some will be offended at the appropriations, but Carpenter and Miller aren’t making this sort of bash any more, and Marshall does it with verve and a clear love of the material.

I don’t know whether Rhona Mitra has a future in movies that require her to, y’know, act, but here she has the right hard-bitten vibe as Major Eden Sinclair, who as a girl escaped the Reaper Virus that consumed Scotland. Now, in 2035, Scotland is walled off and the virus has gotten a foothold in London. Eden is sent over the wall into the hot zone in search of a cure; it’s really more of a P.R. move than an honorable mission. Eden takes a few soldiers in with her, and immediately meets a mob of armed goons who were too young to be in The Road Warrior and have been overcompensating ever since. Their leader is a gnashing, mohawked psycho named Sol (Craig Conway), who looks almost placid next to his girlfriend Viper (the striking-looking stuntwoman Lee-Anne Liebenberg).

Eden’s trials don’t end with the ersatz Road Warriors; there is still Malcolm McDowell to contend with. Something unsettling is happening to McDowell’s nose as he ages, but he’s still in fine ominous voice as the embittered Dr. Kane, who turned his back on society when the wall went up and has ensconced himself in a castle along with a severe band of medievalists. (One especially amusing shot tells us Dr. Kane hasn’t bothered to remove a “Gift Shop” sign from the castle exterior.) Arrows fly, blood spurts, and we aren’t yet even into the car chase, which features, among other things, a severed head placed back onto its body in what I can only describe as a sentimental touch. In its gleeful determination to shoehorn in everything Neil Marshall has always wanted to put on film, Doomsday reminded me of Sam Raimi’s shoot-the-works cult favorite Army of Darkness. The only thing missing is Bruce Campbell, though Doomsday does have Bob Hoskins, snarling avuncularly as usual.

The line between homage and rip-off can be a thin and subtle one. We should also remember that there is nothing new under the sun, that Marshall’s masters Carpenter and Miller did their fair share of reworking earlier material, too. We only think to denounce something as derivative or outright theft if we didn’t enjoy it in the first place. But I had a fine time at Doomsday. It took me right back to the early days of VCRs, when I was a teenager and probably discovering all those grungy sci-fi-horror flicks at about the same time that Marshall was (he’s a month older than I am).

"Doomsday" is, I think, a far more fun tribute to grindhouse than "Grindhouse" was; if someone at Rogue Pictures is smart, they’ll make the DVD packaging look like an old Vestron or Wizard videocassette. Complete with misleading cover art assuring you that Rhona Mitra gets naked (she doesn’t).

Doomsday (2008) by David Cornelius

Some of my colleagues have criticized Neil Marshall for going overboard in its nostalgic aping of fanboy-friendly genre elements - and some of them have applauded him for the very same reason. The writer/director, who achieved cult status with his inventive horror flicks “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent,” approaches his third film, “Doomsday,” with the fervor of a man who thinks he’ll never get to make a fourth. Marshall tosses everything into this picture, resulting in a mulligan stew of genre elements - a mix tape of his favorite lowbrow 80s VHS moments, if you will. The sheer random ridiculousness of it all is cause for either alarm or celebration, depending on your point of view.
I’m unquestionably in the “cause for celebration” corner. Marshall’s recreations are playful and highly rewarding to genre fans - he’s so spot-on that he could have titled it “Grindhouse 2” - but, like Rodriguez and Tarantino’s tributes to cinema trash, “Doomsday” works because the tributes are the icing, not the cake. This is entertainment that holds up completely on its own, without the added silliness of the “Escape from New York” or “Mad Max” callbacks. It’s a furious adventure, balls-out in its over-the-top nature, a guaranteed good time at the multiplex.

An introduction that borrows both the title font and low-tech computer graphics of a certain Snake Plissken flick informs us that after a deadly virus breaks out in the UK, the government erects a massive wall around Scotland, sealing off the virus and leaving the survivors to die. Flash forward a few decades. Overpopulation, a dying economy, and general dystopian gloom have left Britain in shambles, and it looks like the virus has returned, too. Super-soldier Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) and a team of fellow badasses are assigned to reenter Scotland - the “Hot Zone” - and find a scientist who is rumored to have found a cure.

One of Marshall’s strongest points as a master of horror is his knack for surprise, both in the big picture (the plot goes places you’d never guess) and in the moment (no current filmmaker is better at shocking you with an unexpected jolt). As such, any further plot recap would be a disservice; “Doomsday” is such a marvel of oddball story detours that even the twists you can predict still feel fresh and enjoyable. It can be said that of course Sinclair will encounter survivors within the Hot Zone (among them a scenery-chewing Malcolm McDowell and a scene-stealing Craig Conway), and of course they will not be happy, and of course there will be fighting and chases and explosions and beheadings and cannibalism. You know, the usual.

Marshall serves all of this up with terrific energy, so much so that even when the movie stumbles with an ill-timed idea or nugget of clunky acting, we want to cheer for more. The film is a collection of brilliant set pieces: the first attack, the gladiator fight, the femme fatale fight, the train getaway, the reveal of Kane’s lair, the massive car chase, the punk-gang rally inventively scored to a perfectly chosen 80s pop song. Even the corners are cluttered with endless insanity (the gimp!), leaving us overwhelmed. When the dust settles, we might reflect on how it didn’t quite add up, or how you could drive one of those futuristic tanks through most of the plot holes, or how some of the references were a little too much. But when the film’s unspooling and we’re watching Rhona Mitra drive a sports car through an exploding bus, we find ourselves in movie geek heaven.

All of this might not make “Doomsday” Marshall’s best film, but it does make it his most fun. The filmmaker almost dares you to talk back to the screen, to laugh and cheer and whoop it up with every explosion, gunshot, and blood spurt. Marshall takes his project seriously enough for it to be effective as a grisly, grimy, gritty sci-fi splatterfest, but he also knows when to laugh along with us.