It's the end of the world as we know it

The Screening Room
Specially written for What's Up



Check your corners.

That’s one of the many things viewers learn after watching “Doomsday,” Neil Marshall’s deadly virus gore flick that hit theaters this weekend.

Other lessons?

You should never trust a furious quarantine zone survivor, and bad guys with mohawks are never really as hard to outrun as they seem.

Oh yeah, and don’t mess with Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra).

The girl’s got some issues.

“Doomsday” enters the overcrowded realm of contagion cinema with a bloody, bloody bang.

Just ask the cute little rabbit pulverized by a machine gun for venturing for some carrots too close to danger.

But despite taking a crack at an effort made many times over, “Doomsday” makes an impact, one with understated humor that leaves its audience jonesin’ for a car chase and a good cigarette.

It’s set in Great Britain in the near future, when much of Scotland’s population has been quarantined and left for dead after the spread of the Reaper Virus.

But years after the British government assumes the plague is dead and gone, it once again raises its ugly, bubonic head, this time threatening the whole of society, and Eden Sinclair is issued a challenge: Go back into the hot zone and find the cure, because P.S., we’ve been hiding the fact that there are survivors from this virus’ first graveyard go-round.

Eden and her crew venture across the quarantine border, where, surprise-of-all-surprises, a ragtag group with a bone to pick is happy to offer a bloody, bashing welcome.

What’s left of Glasgow has become a place of “social disorder,” better described as the breeding ground for drugs, sex and rock and roll. Oh yeah, and cannibalism, natch.

The survivors are led by Saul, one radical bad guy in a world of chaos, anarchy, fishnets and fire who at one point actually tosses plates to a hungry crowd in pure rock star fashion as they hoist a man above an oversized barbecue, tongues wagging for white meat.

(It was at this point a distinguished elderly couple excused themselves from the theater and did not return.)

But Eden isn’t intimidated by the Lost Boys gone wild, and she manages to find Kane (Malcolm McDowell), who is believed to have the key to outliving the plague.

“In the land of the infected, the immune man is king,” is Kane’s veiled “buzz-off” to Eden, so the born-to-be-bad powerhouse manages to travel between worlds of medieval warfare, post-apocalyptic raves, gas masks and marshall law, all the while leaving a series of awesome explosions and bloody body parts in the wake of one sick set of wheels.

In a genre where the killer disease is a widespread lack of ingenuity, “Doomsday” takes the bloody cake but, takes itself just seriously enough to make the audience’s time worthwhile.