Director Neil Marshall's third film (after Dog Soldiers and The Descent) is a muscular melange of Escape from New York, the Mad Max trilogy and plague movies like I Am Legend. Following the outbreak of the deadly Reaper virus north of the border, Scotland is walled up and the population left to die. But decades later, the disease returns to threaten London. Enter hard-case heroine Rhona Mitra who's assigned to enter the quarantined dead zone with a crack team of specialists to seek a cure. But who or what is waiting for them... With a larger budget ($30 million) than before, Marshall has put together a convincing end-of-the-world action horror that benefits from breathtaking stunts, grisly splatter horror and eye-catching performances from Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell and David O'Hara (playing a particularly icy presence at the heart of government). However, by trying to weave in so many of his movie influences (The Warriors and Aliens, among others), the director fails to stay in control of his narrative or develop his characters beyond the functional. It's a pity, because there are plenty of well-edited, well-shot sequences that could have made Doomsday a must-see blockbuster.

The lethal Reaper virus spreads throughout Britain—infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. Authorities brutally and successfully quarantine the country but, three decades later, the virus resurfaces in a major city. An elite group of specialists is urgently dispatched into the still-quarantined country to retrieve a cure by any means necessary. Shut off from the rest of the world, the unit must battle through a landscape that has become a waking nightmare.