Doomsday is Coming
by Amelia G : March 6th, 2008
As I rode back from the airport yesterday, my car passed a bevy of Blue Blood hotties including Roxy Contin and others, all decked out and waving Doomsday signs. This reminded me that I wanted to tell you all about the upcoming flick. (These two things are related; they were promoting the movie, not predicting the end of the world in their underwear.)
Doomsday is a movie of a dystopian future. In a present day United Kingdom, a fatal viral epidemic has broken out, so a portion is walled off to quarantine the infected. Fast forward 25 years in the future and the disease appears again outside the quarantined zone. The authorities realize that there are still people living within those walls, so they dispatch a hot chick to go see if she can find a cure. The hot cure-hunting chick is played by Rhona Mitra whose accomplishments off the silver screen include being expelled from boarding school and booth babe appearances as Lara Croft at trade shows. I actually thought she was Kate Beckinsdale when I first viewed the trailers for Doomsday and apparently I’d make a good casting director because she is starring in the upcoming Underworld: Rise of the Lycans vampire movie.
At any rate, once inside the walls of the quarantined city, Rhona Mitra’s Eden Sinclair has to go up against an army of citizens who appear to be rather justifiably pissed off about being walled off and then asked for help. The inhabitants of the walled city include a forceful Malcolm McDowell playing a character named Kane and the Golden Rule seems to indicate to me that the outside world doesn’t really deserve a lot of help. The preview images and videos show some very appealing …
Throughout the world there have been all sorts of undead that feed off the blood of the living. Most vampires are not some romantic version of the undead a la Brad Pitt, Frank Langella, Bela Lugosi or even Kate Beckinsale. Vampires have become docile and over-eroticized in the past twenty years with books from Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton. Don’t get me wrong I love the humanization of the vampire and the sexual vampire has something because I think every single person deep down inside of them wishes they could give themselves to a lover forever. (Who could ever forget the 80’s The Hunger.) But in the last twenty years vampire movies, books and storylines have not grabbed me by the throat. (I know bad joke.) Classics like 1922’s Nosferatu where something that was not human was on the screen. Truly undead. Is there any hope for Hollywood’s version of the bloodsucking undead? I think there is and that hope comes in the form of a story that started as a comic book that came out in 2002 from IDW and the minds of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith called 30 Days of Night. 