I’d say that Doomsday is the kind of movie you have to see on the big screen but I’m only 50% sure that’s the case: The goddamn stereo surround sound was conked out until I finally got fed up and traveled three floors below the level where my screening was showing at the AMC on 34th Street to find an employee I could ask to fix it. But based on the gloriously loud second half of the film and my uncanny ability to replicate the sound of gunshots, exploding bunny rabbits, and gristly-wet decapitations in my head, I feel as though I can still recommend Doomsday The Movie-Going Experience wholeheartedly.

Living up to the unfulfilled promise of his overly lauded action-horror debut Dog Soldiers, Neil Marshall delivers a post-apocalyptic action movie fan’s post-apocalyptic action movie. In fact he delivers three or four of them all at once. You’ve got the ganglord-ruled urban nightmare of Escape from New York, the S&M punk barbarian highwaymen of The Road Warrior, the big-lie government manipulation of The Running Man, the military unit in an armored vehicle suspense of Aliens, the regression to medieval times of Steel Dawn, and the viral horror (and at one hilarious point, the actual score!) of 28 Days Later. The riffs on each are so utterly straightforward and unabashed that I’m sure critics are bemoaning its lack of originality, but to me that’s like complaining that D&D owes too much to 20th-century fantasy authors. Of course it’s unoriginal–homages tend to be. All we can ask for them is that they show respect to the audience by expecting us to recognize them as such, and hit those familiar notes so hard and so sweet that we can’t help but sing along. That’s what Marshall does, with inventive gore (the bunny-rabbit scene was so over the top it amused even this staunch vegetarian, as did the cannibal barbeque), immersive analog action set-pieces (lots of car crashes and people being thrown through glass), a half dozen laugh-out-loud clever music cues (“Two Tribes”! A Fine Young Cannibals song!), fine character actors (Bob Hoskins and whatsisname from Gangs of New York play dueling gravel-throats), and a badass action heroine whose Snake-Plissken-with-tits routine is imbued with convincing physicality, at turns believably capable and equally believably vulnerable. And of course those who complain that there’s nothing new here that hasn’t been seen in half a dozen other movies is missing the point–the new thing is that it’s taking stuff from those half a dozen other movies and putting it all in one place! That’s new, and great. And never once do you get the sense that, a la Planet Terror, it’s sitting around patting itself on the back for being hyuk-hyuk awesome–it’s not assuming that you’ll be entertained just because you’ve seen the same movies as the director, it’s working goddamn hard to entertain you precisely because you’ve seen the same movies as the director. It succeeds.

If you like the kinds of movies that I like, I have a hard time seeing how you won’t like this.

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