Sunday, March 23, 2008

"Hungry?"

Doomsday? Is one of the most cracked-out movies I've ever seen. It's INSANE. It's a giant, giddy, sprawling mess of a movie that steals liberally from pretty much every other post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian film already made, but it's so much FUN that I didn't give a damn. It has everything you could ever want in a movie: gun fights, car chases, proper action and shit cannibals, deadly plagues, Mad Max villains, boobs, fist fights, tanks, knights, a dystopian government, bad-ass technology, anarchy and chaos, every British accent imaginable...

At one point -- I'm not sure which, but it might've been when the leader of the cannibalistic Road Warrior ripoffs was dancing spastically across a stage to the tune of the Fine Young Cannibals' "Good Thing" -- I leaned over to The Boy and gleefully whispered, "This is the best movie ever."

He grinned at me, wide-eyed and ecstatic, and said, "IT TOTALLY IS!"

And then the heroine got into a sword fight with a hot tattooed chick, and we both made this face for the rest of the movie: 8D!!!

It's funny -- most of the reviews I've seen have been negative, because critics generally hate giant, silly, cracked-out movies that make no fucking sense and rip off everything else in the genre. I, however, maintain that this is exactly why it's awesome. Doomsday is a movie that exists for the sheer love of the sci-fi dystopia, and I fully expect that it's going to end up as a cult movie once it's gone to DVD and people rediscover it lurking there in the shelves. No, the film doesn't make any sense -- afterward, I was trying to figure out where all the gasoline came from for the cars, and my head started to hurt a little -- but it's not the sort of movie that's supposed to make sense. You see it for the cannibals and the fifteen minute long car chase with a Bentley and motorcycles decked out with skeletons, for Malcolm McDowell as the insane leader of a neo-medieval society, for the dudes with mohawks dressed in fetish gear. You see it because it's gloriously over-the-top and doesn't take itself seriously at all, and there's something wonderful and refreshing about that.

I suspect it's one of those "love it or hate it" movies. I love things like Reign of Fire and Army of Darkness and Mad Max, so it would've taken an act of God for me to hate Doomsday. Hee.

P.S. Happy Easter, everyone!

No comments: