Doomsday Stories

Just watched Phil Herman's Doomsday Stories. Don't be alarmed by the 2 hour runtime, it's an anthology with several short stories, so the runtime is appropriate and the pacing is brisk. The stories are all a reasonable length. I won't get into spoilers but Phil Herman directs and stars in the wraparound wherein he tells stories of survivors of the "Meanies" virus. The shorts are all well done and entertaining, but my personal favorites are "A Broken Promise" by Derek Braasch, "187 Times" by Joel D Wynkoop, and Herman's wraparound story. "187 Times" is a time travel short and I really enjoyed it.

The other stories are "Bomb Threats" and "Forever Man". I especially enjoyed the zombie makeup, and the practical as well as VFX effects in Forever Man. It's a lot of fun.

The nice thing about anthologies is there is something for everyone and while I'm sure you'll have your favorites, these are all solid shorts. Check out Doomsday Stories, the stories are especially relevant in the post pandemic world we're living in.

Special shout out to The Donner Party who perform the opening and closing songs to the movie. Great stuff! I'll definitely be listening to more of them in the future!

A low budget romp through Doomsday. Very well made and all 4 stories that comprise this movie are shot well and fun to watch. Each one tells of the days leading up to the destruction of the earth through an airborne virus called Meanies.

A host tell stories of the old world from a book he found from a survivor who meets her end.

Very fun locations and effects really help keep your interest. While this is low budget all the actors do well with the scripts provided.

This is based on a movie called Hell on Earth: Arena of Death made over 30 years ago.

I did not want it to end and hope a sequel is being planned.

I love anthologies when they are done right. I feel that anthologies give an audience a look at directors, writers, and actors who would have not been seen otherwise. Sadly, Doomsday Stories doesn't make the cut of a good movie, even for an anthology. With a runtime of two hours, this is way too long to sit through. Had this been made into an episodic series of shorts, it may have been tolerable.

Throughout all of Doomsday Stories, the effects were quite inconsistent. There were a lot of computer effects used in the picture, so it is weird to me that none of the directors felt the need to use computer effects when it came to gunfire. One story used effects so much that it looked like a video game from the early 2000s. In fact, a majority of the film looked as though it was made in the early 2000s.

There's little sense of cohesion among these segments, which didn't matter in Doomsday Stories as they were meant to simply be collections of scary stories. Here they're supposed to be chronicles of the apocalypse, but they feel more like seperate shorts dealing with different versions of the end of the world, undercutting the theme of Doomsday Stories. The result is an uneven, and unfortunatly unsatisfying, film overall.

Technically it's abysmal, shot on a mobile phone, very bad quality on most camera angles, cringey heavy metal music and acting that's as wooden as my cabin shed. Avoid it like the plague!

In this film we find how it is possible to create and develop stories with a minimum budget based on what is essential in cinema, which is precisely to tell stories.

4 stories in the same time frame but with different approaches manage to evade budgetary problems and present a pessimistic vision of the future and, above all, of Humanity, but with an underlying hope in the very essence of the human being.

4 strong stories, well outlined and with strongly motivated characters.

Entertaining film with various proposals that leave room to reflect on the course of our society.

Highly recommended.