Hi kids! Well, I've been a bit under the weather the last few days and rather than waste the time spent in bed watching Paul Lewis and David Dickinson, I went instead for Neil Marshall's jaw-droppingly dire movie Doomsday.

Now, we can all see what happened - the idea clearly was to recreate a kind of Escape from New York/Mad Max type of vibe with the twist being that it's all very English (well, Scottish). Fine, straightforward enough, get a Fairlight, some straightfaced actors to slice their ham very thickly and design some steaming bits of cyberpunk machinery and off we go. The problem is that we're all so far beyond post-irony that Bob Hoskins spitting out "fuhkkin" in the middle of every other sentence ONLY sounds like Bob Hoskins saying "fuhkkin", not like any hammy actor overdoing it in an ironical 80's fashion, and hard-ass men and women saying hard-ass things just looks sort of crap, not like Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken being all snarky. To cut to the chase, too many bad films have been made seriously in the style of Escape from New York, that it's impossible to tell the difference now between a clever homage and all the rest. The other big problem is that Rhona Mitra isn't up to the task of being hard-ass, ironic and not shit. She's great at the action stuff and she can jump-cut leap about with the best of them, and she's good at looking like this:

But when it comes to the acting, she's a wash-out (and the problem with this kind of movie is that the actors have to really convincingly act at not being able to act, a demand which requires exceptional acting ability, er, if you follow me. Like Hoskins.). As someone whose career thus far has consisted of Ali G In Da House, Hollow Man and an Underworld sequel, she's got some way to go before convincing anybody that she's got the chops and unfortunately this mess certainly isn't it. It's a big shame as Neil Marshall's previous films Dog Soldiers and The Descent had some interesting stuff in them but where those films only unravel when their influences start to weigh too heavily (An American Werewolf for the former, The Thing for the latter), Doomsday's conceit needs, through necessity, to be played out from the start and you're left with nothing but gore and ham to grab hold of from the opening titles onwards.