DOOMED
2006 – NR – 76 Min.
D: Michael Su
S: Sarah Diaz – Drew Russell – Steve Cryen – Michael Kehoe
Maverick Entertainment DVD
Fullscreen / 5.1 Surround
Extras: Trailers
Ten people serving long sentences for myriad crimes are dropped on the Isola De Romero *cough* and divided into teams of two. These teams are instructed to try to make it to the other side of the island where millions of dollars and a complete pardon await them. Freedom, riches, everything they could want, with one catch… The island is overrun with the living dead. All this will be filmed and broadcast on the popular TV show Survival Island 2020. There’ll be alliances, betrayals, and many other staples of successful reality television. The kicker is that nobody has survived so far and the show is still looking for its first heroic victors. Will this episode finally find a winner? Will you even care? This feisty independent borrows from places too numerous to list here and attempts to come up with something a little different. They definitely achieved that, just not to any degree of satisfaction. Although a warning about graphic violence and gore is slapped on the case, you won’t find any in the movie. This is much more action than horror, that itself is not the problem. No depth, no staying power, no viewer involvement, these are the problems. The action choreography is well done and at 76 minutes the pace is brisk. Some clever touches are present, such as explaining the cameras at the outset, but none of it’s enough to keep interest piqued. These are all hardened criminals, mass-murderers in some cases. Who really cares if they end up as zombie-poop anyway? Sounds like they deserve it! So that’s Doomed. A valiant effort; it tries hard but is unable to achieve better than ‘average at best’. Worth a rent.