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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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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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’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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When some of the first words you hear in a film are David Cronenberg telling you that he’s calling for the gas company, which will do its best to keep the gas flowing until the very end, that this isn’t a traditional end-of-the-world film. In fact, it’s a film that doesn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how the world ends, and isn’t going to have Bruce Willis show up to protect us all at the very last moment.

Instead, “Last Night”, written, directed by and starring Don McKellar - who later won an Oscar for the screeplay for “The Red Violin” - the film has other familiar faces in Sandra Oh (“Sideways”, “Under the Tuscan Sun”, “The Princess Diaries”, “Grey’s Anatomy”), Callum Keith Rennie (“Memento”, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Blade - Trinity”) and Genevieve Bujold (“King Of Hearts”, “Dead Ringers”, “Coma”).

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Ain’t It Cool News dug up a trailer for a supposed short film called “Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse”, with Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen, both currently in “Knocked Up”. It looks like a post-end-of-the-world buddy film… I’m not sure that anything more than this trailer exists… since IMDB doesn’t know about it then that’s probably the case. In any event, the idea is probably funnier than the execution, so perhaps that’s for the best.

The YouTube video is below. It may be not safe for work, depending on where you work.
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Dark Horizons offers some corrections from Fox about recent reports on Ain’t It Cool News which I’ve ranted about (er, covered) recently.

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‘Final Days of Planet Earth’ airs tonight (Saturday, October 14) at 8PM on - get ready for it - The Hallmark Channel. This marks the greeting card channel’s first foray into the realm of SciFi Channel-quality Saturday night trash.

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