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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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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Naegleria fowleri - sounds a little like some kind of scam where someone emails you telling you they want to wire you lots of money if you will send them your bank account number. It’s actually a brain-eating amoeba, and when you see a big graphic proclaiming “Brain! Eating! Amoeba!” on a new service web page, it tends to catch your attention.

While not strictly apocalyptic (except to the person whose brain is being eaten), it qualifies as “Plague” and is therefore blog-worthy. As an added benefit, it even has a global warming tie-in!

The news article describes amoeba infections as attacks, as if the amoeba are sitting around dark corners of lakes waiting to mug you. In reality they live on the bottoms of lakes and go up your noise when water is stirred up such that it goes… up your nose. So don’t get water up your nose and you’ll probably be okay.
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BBC reports that Japan 49,000 chickens on a farm in the Miyazaki region of Japan would be slaughtered after 3,000 dead chickens from the farm all tested positive for bird flu. It wasn’t clear to me whether the chickens had died on their own or whether they had been slaughtered and then tested.

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There’s a new review of “Ever Since the World Ended”, the post-plague film set in San Francisco. This film has previously appeared on the Apocalypse blog.

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For the latest news from Death City, check out the Death City blog as it details the spread of the mysterious disease afflicting Death City residents. Told by Xav, a reporter for the Death City Chronicle, the blog provides the real information that the papers are afraid to print.

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Plague of Spinach isn’t a proper biblical tribulation, is it? Maybe it’s time to update those bibles, although the contaminated spinach saga seems to be winding down.

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Treehugger tries to argue that the beef industry is going to destroy the world through spinach