Movie review: 'Doomsday' doomed to repeat the past

One of the unspoken rules for surviving the movie game is "Always sign up for your next film before the one you just finished comes out." Call it Elizabeth Berkley's Law. She didn't have her future planned beyond "Showgirls." After it came out, she was pretty much history.

Thus, the news that director Neil Marshall ("The Descent") was signing up to do another horror piece, "Sacrilege," could be taken as a sign: Whatever the studio thought of "Doomsday," Marshall will work again.

Imagine a sci-fi thriller that begins by copying "28 Days Later" and every other deadly virus movie of recent vintage, then rolls on to steal from "Escape From New York" (Glasgow, in this case) and climaxes with a blatant "Road Warrior" rip-off.

Imagine a villain, a scientist trapped in the netherworld of a Scotland that Britain has to quarantine to prevent the spread of a new zombie virus, a man (Malcolm McDowell) who takes fellow survivors to a Scottish castle where he recreates a medieval world of ad hoc knights and peasants that he rules from his throne like a nut who has memorized Marlon Brando's turn as Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now."

And imagine a heroine in "Underworld"/"Aeon Flux" tights (Rhona Mitra) sent to retrieve "the cure" to this virus from that Scottish heck-on-Earth, who plots her escape in a 2008 Bentley that turns out to be the slowest getaway car on the market.

The virus strikes in April 2008. It is contained to Scotland. Sinclair (Mitra) escaped the quarantine as a child. Now, 27 years later, the virus is back, about to overwhelm London. But there were survivors in Scotland. Perhaps the mad scientist (McDowell) found a cure. Sinclair, at the head of a crack team packed into the most inadequately armored combat vehicles this side of Basra, goes to fetch it.

She finds a cannibalistic culture that has ingested every hair and tattoo style from the "Mad Max" movies and that stages rock revues (set to tunes by Fine Young Cannibals, cute) as they char-broil their prisoners into Glasgow barbecue.

Just down the railroad, Sinclair finds the castle where Kane (McDowell) runs his own, equally violent alternative nation.

Bob Hoskins is Sinclair's boss, a cop struggling to save Britain from an idiotically scripted government conspiracy to let millions die off in a survival-of-the-fittest "living space" scheme straight out of Nazi Germany.

Marshall mimics scenes and shots from "Apocalypse Now," "Escape From New York" and "The Road Warrior" in Scottish settings. Those movies aren't holy writs, so remaking them is fair game. But did he have to do it so incompetently?

His "Descent," about a group of female cavers who stumble across an Appalachian nightmare deep in the bowels of the mountains, was chilling. "Doomsday" manages no scares, just graphic scenes of cannibalism, torture and dismemberment. Mitra, so sexy and charismatic, isn't Kate Beckinsale-cool enough to pull this off.