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Neil Marshall talks 'Doomsday'

Mon 07 Jan 10:20 AM

"Descent" and "Dog Soldiers" writer/director Neil Marshall has been waxing lyrical about his latest foray in to the sci-fi/action realm with "Doomsday" on his MySpace page. Dubbed an 'action adventure' by Marshall the film will see Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Adrian Lester, Alexander Siddig and Malcolm McDowell trying to survive in an apocalyptic landscape ravaged by the Reaper virus.

Said landscape is walled off and quarantined leaving social unrest and the deadly virus to turn the once peaceful country in to a living nightmare. A team of specialists, headed by Eden Sinclair (Mitra), are sent over the top to retrieve a cure for the virus by any means necessary. "Doomsday" seems to have flourishes of both the "28 Days Later" series and John Carpenter's "Escape from New York" but who better to describe the production than the director himself? What follows is the potted highlights from Marshall's blog entry.

"One of the things I was adamant about doing with "Doomsday" was going back to a kind of gritty stunt/action movie that doesn't get made anymore. Real people, in a real world, doing really REALLY dangerous stuff! No green screen, no wires...... We closed down the city centre (to stage a frantic foot/bus/motorbike chase) on a Saturday afternoon! We took over a major theme park, dressed it as the villains lair (playing host to a twisted Moulin Rouge-style stage show and a spot of brutal human sacrifice!) and filled it with a thousand screaming extras, waving baseball bats, hanging from the rafters and generally baying for blood..... Just to clarify, Doomsday is NOT a horror film. Yes, it's dark. Yes, it's brutal and violent. (Hey, it's me !) And yes, it 's even a little scary at times. But a horror film it is not. The mistake, and this seems to be based on contemporary cinema lore, which states that virus = zombies....it seems that any film dealing with a virus automatically has to have some variation of the living dead running around devouring people. Well, our virus is back to basics. The real deal. It kills people. Pure and simple"