There is no slow build in "Doomsday." Geysers of blood, severed limbs and pustule-ravaged faces blanket the opening frames. Then Rhona Mitra's machete-wielding babe with the removable, bionic eyeball shows up to wreak her own pickax-to-the-face brand of havoc, decapitating her way through tribes of Thunderdome-ready cannibals.
That's when things really get moving. One character is barbecued alive. Medieval knights on horseback pursue post-apocalyptic marauders, and Malcolm McDowell does his best Col. Kurtz a la King Lear. And there's a marathon car chase led by a 2008 Bentley. It's "Mad Max" meets "Escape From New York" with a dash of Monty Python.
The auteur responsible for all this mayhem is British writer-director Neil Marshall, and even he acknowledges he's gone a little hog wild. "Doomsday" cost about $28 million courtesy of Universal's genre arm, Rogue Pictures, and Intrepid Pictures -- more than three times the combined total of his previous two films.
"It's pretty dense, isn't it?" he quipped. "With this one, it was like opening the doors and filming in these grand open fields. I think I was really just wallowing in the scale of it."
"Doomsday," which opens wide on Friday, isn't what fans might expect of Marshall. The director's previous efforts, 2002's werewolf picture "Dog Soldiers" and 2005's spelunking nightmare "The Descent," were praised as tautly written, lo-fi, character-driven horror films.
Indeed, Marshall's street cred after "Descent" was so solid that the Rogue co-president and executive producer, Andrew Rona, was sold on "Doomsday" based on the title, the concept and an over-the-phone pitch. "It was an homage to some of my favorite movies," said Rona.
(The partnership is set to continue -- this week, the studio confirmed yet another project with Marshall, "Sacrilege," a horror film set during the Gold Rush.)
"Doomsday's" rigorous shoot took place in Cape Town, South Africa, and Glasgow, Scotland, involving thousands of extras, a series of grand pyrotechnics and complex fight scenes. After Marshall saw the sleek Aston Martin DBS in "Casino Royale," he decided he wanted a super-sexy car in his film too. So the producers ordered three new Bentleys at $150,000 a pop. (The British carmaker doesn't do product placement.)
One of the Bentleys skidded backward over a 40-foot cliff, miraculously landing in a riverbed on all four wheels, injuring none of the four stuntmen inside. Earlier that same day, Marshall and his crew had to evacuate a tunnel when a generator caught fire. In the end, the production's only serious injury was a broken nose.
