Doomed

First things first: I bought this at a car boot sale for 50p so I'm going easy on it. Plus I bought it because I knew it would be terrible. It just wasn't as terrible as I hoped it'd be.

Story is: convicts on an island as part of a game show, split into team and being hunted by really bad army zombie types. You know the drill. These are fast zombies but for some reason is doesn't take much to kill them off.

There's not much else to the story. Folk die. Folks double cross each other. This one isn't too slow on the action however and I cut it a lot of slack for not being boring or too long (It's only 76mins). The game show angle is good but not executed as well as, say, the film Slashers (picked that one up at the same car boot sale!).

What really does this film in is a severe lack of gore. It's a zombie film, for f*ck's sake! The film has plenty of instances where there could be gut munching, but pulls away every single time. Not good. No nudity either, so don't expect anything there.

If you like very low budget films (like me) then it's worth a watch. We've had much more terrible films foisted on us. If it had some bite to it to, I would have rated it much higher.

Reality TV is something I wish would go away, but likely it's not. Doomed is about Survival Island 2020, where contestants go to battle zombies. Could anything go wrong? Think Jurassic Park - didn't something go wrong in every single movie? Well part of what's wrong with this is directing, acting, budget, special effects. There are only two kinds of zombie movies: Good and Bad. Bad is what this is.

This has to be one of the worst films of this year. The special effects were horrible and amateur. Totally low budget as well. Everything was typical from start, it starts off with killing the off the two black actors in the beginning and through out the film it was so annoying to see how these people had no sense of survival which is typical in these types of films, it was just way too predictable. The zombies weren't even realistic or scary. They look like they were wearing Halloween costumes in all honesty. It's no wonder it went straight to DVD. I couldn't imagine this even playing in the Theaters. I would be seriously p*ssed off if I paid to see this honestly.

I am not a "Survivor" fan. I find all those game boring. But, come up with a "Survivor" episode where you have to escape a bunch of zombies to win the prize, and I'll be glued to the set.

Forget the story here, what there is of it has so many holes it looks like Swiss cheese, and the dialog is rehashed from other low budget films.

In fact, halfway through a hot girl called looking for a shoulder to cry on and I muted the sound and read the subtitles while we talked. I guess everyone else was out partying, and I was the only one left. I didn't miss a thing. That's how heavy this was.

Bottom line, the only person in this film with any experience was Mary Christina Brown. But the fact that there was no nudity, and no gore made this one zombie film to pass on - even if you see it free.

Every so often lucky stars align in the making of a movie.

In this case, the lucky stars of crappy writing, cliché dialogue, ham acting, cheap special effects, and inept direction align to produce that all-too-common of beasts: a movie which can be released directly to the 99 cent bin. It's overpriced at that.

The thoughtful comments of other IMDb members have been spot on, and I wish I'd taken them seriously before wasting my time with this movie.

"Doomed" has a few redeeming values; there's some nice action choreography, and the visual cutting and the music aren't too bad. Not surprising, since they've been scalped from TV shows like 'Survivor'.

Still, there ought to be a law that a 'horror movie' should at one time or another actually try to _scare_ the audience. If anyone tried here, they failed miserably. The zombies aren't scary, and the characters are so one-dimensional that you don't care whether they live or die. This is a common problem with bad horror films.

The 'kicker', which is stolen wholesale from Lucio Fulci's "Zombie 2", is so predictable that you find yourself counting seconds until it happens. If they'd had the cones to steal more from Fulci, this movie might have been watchable.

The main problem this film faces is indecision about what kind of movie it wants to be, and then failing at each turn. 'Survivor' spoof? Not funny enough. Zombie horror? Not gory enough. Biting social commentary on the reality show industry? Not smart enough. Action flick? Sorry. Not even Jean-Claude Van Damme (whose acting skills I came to appreciate while watching this) could have helped this.

The 'computer game' analogy perpetrated on the audience adds the finishing kill shot to this miserable effort; instead of enriching the experience, it annoys the hell out of the viewer. Getting a score for each body blow or kill is only interesting if you're in control of the game and the score is yours. Otherwise, it's disturbing visual clutter.

While not the worst horror film I've seen recently (that honor might befall "House of the Dead", a *real* turkey), it is plenty awful. Zombie horror fans have nothing to get out of this one.

Look for the leading actors behind the counter of your local Wendy's. And, if you should step over the writer lying in some gutter in Your Town, U.S.A, give him a kick for me. He should have been eaten by Zombies.