Doomed

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.

Allow me to save you $8 by offering something you can do at home that is just as entertaining as watching this movie. Go get a load of whites and throw it in your dryer. Now, add in one red sock. (Make sure everything's dry so you don't end up with a bunch of pink laundry.) Now, hopefully you have the kind of dryer that has the clear window in front. If you do, start the load and watch the laundry spin around. Every time you see the red sock pretend to be scared.

That's it. That's the equivalent to seeing this movie. As entertaining as watching your laundry dry and every bit as scary as a red sock. and not to mention the total butchering of the zombie genre.

Giving it a 1/10 is actually really really generous.

This is in the tradition of '28 Days Later' and 'Dawn of the Dead' (as the DVD proudly states) in that, like those horror classics, it has a 'D' in the title; with regards to style, tone, originality, and quality, it bears very little resemblance to either film, the special effects being cheap, the plot stale and riddled with holes, and the outcome predictable. A more accurate description might be 'The Condemned' (the equally dumb Vinnie Jones/Steve Austin flick that came out the same year)—but with zombies.

And yet, despite all of this, I found Doomed to be far more entertaining than I had expected.

The mere fact that director Michael Su isn't striving to deliver anything other than a mindless B-movie frees him from the pressures of doing anything remotely new with the zombie/action genre and allows him to just get on and have fun with things. The film wastes no time with unnecessary build-up, gets straight into the action, and the fast pace is kept going until the end; the fight scenes are impressive for such a low budget effort; and the cast put in surprisingly good performances (plus, there's the added bonus that the ladies are all very easy-on-the-eye).

Admittedly I'd have enjoyed the film a touch more had the gore quotient had been higher, there were fewer shots of the CGI island (which looks nothing like the one on the maps given to the contestants), the use of gimmicky editing tricks had been kept under tighter control, and if a couple of the girls had stopped to take a shower together under a waterfall, but even as it stands, I think Doomed is worth a higher rating than it currently has.

6/10 from me.

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.

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.