Neil Marshall (known for the horror films "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent") has a new film out today, which I’ve written about a couple of times: the appropriately named “Doomsday”.

In 2037, thirty years after Scotland was sealed off to contain a plague, Bob Hoskins sends Rhona Mitra back into Scotland in order to try to find the cure, as the disease has recurred outside. In the process she encounters Malcolm McDowell, doing a turn as Colonel Kurtz (but not o be too obvious, his character is named “Kane” instead of “Kurtz”).

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And I don’t mean the kind you hitch to your car (although that could be pretty cool).

No, this is the theatrical trailer for Neil Marshall’s new film “Doomsday”. Marshall’s previous credits are “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent”

The story goes that in 2008 a plague spreads rapidly in Scotland; to save the world, Scotland is quarantined and basically written off as dead; forgotten about. 25 years later the plague reappears outside of Scotland. Because we know that there are survivors in there, Bob Hoskins sends Rhona Mitra in it find the cure (isn’t that what you’d do?) and return with it. In the process she finds Malcolm McDowell playing (what else?) an evil genius who’s holed up in a Scottish castle taking a Colonel Kurtz-like turn.

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We’re in Santiago, Chile for a few days, on our way home from a trip to see Easter Island - not a particularly apocalyptic thing although it might be a good place to ride out a zombie attack if you need to. I can’t remember if it was mentioned in “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” or not. The island is one of the most remote, and the ocean floor drops off sharply near it, possibly making it difficult for underwater zombies to reach land.

But I digress.

We took a break from sight-seeing and all the empanadas and ham-and-cheese sandwiches to see “Soy Leyenda” yesterday, which I’d been interested in seeing in the US but didn’t have time to catch before we left. The film was in English with Spanish subtitles… there are several places in the film where you can barely hear lines, and it’s odd to see them clearly (in Spanish) in the subtitles. Given how weak my Spanish is, I could barely understand the subtitles, too.

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There’s finally an “exclusive” trailer out for George A. Romero’s new zombie film, “Diary of the Dead”. The trailer starts with an intro from Romero himself, promoting a contest to include a select short horror film on the DVD release of his new movie.

“Diary of the Dead” is said to be more of a reboot of the classic “Night of the Living Dead” than a continuation of it. The new films depicts the start of the dead returning to life as flesh-eating zombies in a contemporary setting, documented by a student filmmaker.

The new film opens in limited release in the US on February 15. The trailer is after the cut.
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I’ve written about Neil Marshall’s new film, “Doomsday”, a few times before. Marshall brings with him a good resume of genre films: “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent”, which leaves many people anticipating his new bigger budget, bigger concept film “Doomsday”.

In the world of “Doomsday”, Scotland is walled off to protect the rest of the world from a deadly virus called “Reaper”. 30 years pass and there’s a Reaper outbreak in another country, leading our heroes to enter the ruins of Scotland in order to try to find a cure. Malcolm McDowell stars as “Kane”, patterned after Kurtz from “Heart of Darkness” (or “Apocalypse Now” in the event that you’ve never read the book).

Someday we’ll progress to a point where scary, over the edge guys in media won’t be named variations of Cain or Kurtz.

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I think it’s official: Southland Tales has crashed and burned and already vanished from theaters. It wasn’t playing locally and I’d thought about going to Boston for a day to see it, but it had already been pared down to a single theater showing only a 1:30PM show… and now it’s gone, not even showing at the second run movie theaters.

Perhaps it will have some sort of after-live on DVD or Showtime.

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I’ve been hanging on to these for much too long… now I’m going to post an article with so many links out that Google will probably decide that the blog is a link farm and stop indexing it…

Today is the day before Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” goes into limited release in the US (on Wednesday, November 14th), and wide release this Friday, November 16th.

Richard Kelly, you may recall, wrote and directed “Donnie Darko”, the (dare I say) dark, funny, somewhat-science fiction film that I want to say launched Jake Gyllenhaal on the world, except that it wasn’t his first film and not many people saw it. The film involved time travel, possible hallucinations, a man in a rabbit suit talking about the end of the world, and disenfranchisement, and suffered from being released soon after September 11th, 2001 - a major plot point in the film involves falling aircraft pieces.

This is all very timely for me as I had the good fortune to see a stage adaptation of “Donnie Darko” by the American Repertory Theatre this weekend (held at the wonderfully named “Zero Arrow Theatre” - it’s at 0 Arrow St.). The production was surprisingly good.

Kelly’s new film - “Southland Tales” seems to follow on similar themes. Sarah Michelle Gellar is cast as a porn star trying to break into mainstream film (”Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted”), pitching her script through an amnesiac action star played by “The Rock”, Dwayne Johnson. The film takes place in a Los Angeles in the near future, after nuclear attacks in Texas have propelled the USA into becoming more of an in-denial-police-state.

The film famously was booed at its premiere at Cannes in 2006. Sony Entertainment picked it up and Richard Kelly cut the film by 25 minutes.

Three graphic novels are available as a prequel to the film: “Southland Tales Book 1: Two Roads Diverge”, “Southland Tales Book 2: Fingerprints” and “Southland Tales Book 3: The Mechanicals”. The three are also collected together in a single volume: “Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga”. They follow the main characters and explore the setting, presumably leading up to the events of the film.
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Dark Horizons reports that Guy Pearce (of “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert”, “L.A. Confidential”, “Memento”, “The Time Machine”, and one of my all-time favorite horror films, “Ravenous”) has joined the cast of the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.

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A little something for spooky-day: we haven’t even seen it yet, but George A. Romero’s “Diary of the Dead” has already been approved for a sequel, written and directed by Romero (of course).

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Warren Ellis shared a link to a brief apocalyptic film on YouTube. “Silent City” by Ruairi Robinson. Robinson was nominated for an academy award in 2001 for a 3 minute short animated film called “Fifty Percent Gray” (see it on YouTube) about a soldier who wakes up dead. While that nomination didn’t substantially help his career, “The Silent City” apparently did, netting him an agent.

“The Silent City” is a seven minute seven second film of a violent post-apocalyptic world that’s anything but silent. The embedded YouTube video follows. It features Don Wycherley, a few seconds of Cillian Murphy, and Garvan McGrath.

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