Doom: Annihilation (2019)

A squad of “UAC Marines” - which seems to be some sort of corporate military deal where the least competent would-be soldiers around get dumped going by the rest of the film – under on Leutnant Joan Dark (Amy Manson) land on a top secret research base on the Martian moon Phobos for elevated guard duty. As luck will have it, teleportation (and more) experiments have just opened a gate to a hell dimension, and soon these incompetents and nitwits have to fight for their lives.

Given how much money the Doom games make, I have a hard time understanding how the film deal the franchise gets is this. The film at hand dwells in the most impoverished part of direct to home video action cinema, where not only hiring some bad luck former Academy Award winner for a couple of shooting days is right out (you’re in luck, Sir Ben Kingsley), but even the mandatory fifteen minutes of Dolph or JCVD is too costly, and the only guy they can get is Louis (not even Costas!?) Mandylor popping in for a bit. To be fair, the actors are perfectly competent, just not terribly interesting. Compared to this, the much-maligned but in my opinion really rather fun first attempt at a Doom movie was richly endowed with production values. Now, I know the Doom universe isn’t exactly an ideal source for more than a fun shoot ‘em up movie, but you really can aim a bit higher with that as well; just look at John Wick, for Cthulhu’s sake!

That having quite this little money available is not a good thing for science fiction action horror thing that should actually have quite a few special effects sequences and proper action set pieces should come as little surprise. Really, the only thing that could have come to the rescue would have been one of the top tier direct to video action directors, say Peter Hyams or Isaac Florentine who know how to make every cent count and possess highly developed visual imaginations. Instead, we get Tony Giglio, the guy who directed Chaos (not the great one, nor the Academy Award winner, but the one with Wesley Snipes). While Giglio is a professional director – the film’s in focus and properly edited, at least – he’s doing strictly competetent work here, with little visible effort to bring the production design of corridors (and then more corridors) and five minutes of videogame hell to life.

The action scenes aren’t exactly bad, but there’s also little anyone who has seen some of the cinematic children of Aliens will find exciting. In fact, the action is so bland, I was wishing fondly for a bit of Paul W.S. Anderson in here, whose films may suck more often than not but who is a t least always trying to make them look interesting. Of course, I would be surprised if this film had more than a tenth of the budget of your typical Anderson outing.

Not at all helping anything at all is that Giglio’s script (for yes, he’s also wearing the writer’s hat) believes it has to present us with thirty-five minutes of character stuff before we get to the first bit of amateur space marine versus monsters action. Clearly, the bunch of one-note clichés and their oh so interesting backstories we have seen in hundreds of other films need many a scene of introduction; and obviously, everyone in the market of watching a Doom movie will have no idea whatsoever of what’s happening on Phobos and will be terribly surprised once the monsters attack. It can be problematic to write too much towards a certain audience, but come on!

Speaking of the monsters, Doom: Annihilation certainly doesn’t do itself any favours by, once it finally gets around to the stuff the audience has actually come for, then starting out with having the space marines for the next twenty minutes or so fight creatures which are for all intents and purposes blue-faced zombies. That’s certainly keeping the special effects budget in check, but is pretty much the most boring, over-used thing the film could have used. Of course, the videogame-approved demons we get later are not terribly interesting either, they just turn out to be terrible bullet sponges. Or rather, they are terrible bullet sponges unless Joan shoots them, for her bullets are clearly coated with protagonist venom, so a monster everyone else needs to pump an assault rifle mag or two into until it stops moving is conquered by a couple of shots with our heroine’s handguns. On the plus side, Doom Guy’s a girl now.


Which is the kind of positive note I like to end my write-ups of otherwise blandly bad movies on.

Daylight’s End (2016)

About three years ago, a (of course mysterious) plague struck the world, turning large parts of the population into rage zombie/vampire things that run around more or less mindlessly screaming, drink blood and dissolve when hit by too much sunlight. Now, we’re in Post-Apocalyptica again, the vampires and mindless raiders bothering the few enclaves of civilized humanity.

Rourke (Johnny Strong), our hero of the day, traumatized by the death of his wife at the start of the plague, is roaming the USA in his car, hunting vampires; he’s apparently good enough at it to have made it from New York to Texas. In the god-forsaken ruins of a small town, Rourke saves a woman named Sam (Chelsea Edmundson) from rape and murder by marauders. Sam is now – after the marauders slaughtered her friends – the sole member of an expedition sent out by a group of survivors lead by ex-policeman Frank (Lance Henriksen) holed up in Dallas. Sam and her friends were tasked with finding a cargo plane for the group large enough to get them all to Baja where there’s supposed to be a survivalist enclave. They did even manage to find a plane before the marauders attacked. She convinces the gruff and grumpy Rourke to get her to Dallas.

Once there, things should be easy enough, and not involve various brave/suicidal last stands to hold back any vampire hordes.

Obviously, William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End is mostly a recombination of various elements of zombie post-apocalypse movies, Mad Max style post-apocalypses, and the kind of action Kaufman and leading man (and composer of the movie’s score) Johnny Strong have teamed up for repeatedly, so originality isn’t really a concern. We all know the character types, we know the plot beats, and we know at least in loose terms how things will turn out for everyone.

In this case, however, that doesn’t mean the resulting film isn’t worth watching. Kaufman does manage to get a surprising amount of spectacle out of a clearly minor budget, the action is staged well, and the film flows surprisingly well even though large parts of it reveal it as a corridor runner, that is to say, a film that largely consists of people running up and down various ugly corridors while shooting and sometimes screaming, which isn’t generally a promise of fun. Indeed, the final third of the film does probably contain ten minutes or so too many of this particular stuff, but for most of the running time, Kaufman make all the running back and forth exciting via the magic of effective staging and editing that does its level best to not get things bogged down. There are a good handful of moments in the film that I found genuinely exciting, but just as importantly, Kaufman avoids any scenes that are boring.

Why, even Rourke’s mandatory trauma, and the scenes of minor – Kaufman’s characters generally have a feel of the sort of hard-bitten professionals Howard Hawks loved so much - in-fighting between the survivors make sense and never overstay their welcome. The script (by Chad Law) tends to underplay the possible melodrama, which makes perfect sense for a group of people who have survived for quite this long – if they’ve not gone insane fighting the zombie vampires, they’re probably too numb by now to have screaming matches for longer than five minutes. Characters are archetypes but drawn in short, sharp strokes and as a whole acted well (or at least well enough). There’s certainly never any of the awkwardness in speech or movement from the living you often encounter in low budget zombie apocalypse films. Plus, it’s nice to see a movie that seems to know Lance Henriksen is a treasure.


While this doesn’t add up to a deeply memorable film, or something new in its sub-genre, Daylight’s End’s general air of craftsmanship certainly makes it worth one’s time.