Flash forward a few years. We're in what has to be an even worse dystopia, because Malky-Walky McDowell is still telling us what's going on. Horrorshow! The United Kingdom is falling apart in an amped-up hyperbole of the Thatcher years that will make you want to throw on some old bootboy albums by The Exploited and The Violators. PM Hatcher (Siddig), which rhymes with Thatcher, in case you didn't notice, is having a hard time keeping the lid on poverty and overpopulation when the reaper virus decides to rear its contagious head.

Eden (Mitra), now all grown up and a one-eyed, Pilates-buffed, supertough Snakette Plisskin cop, is tapped to lead a team into Scotland, where survivors have been spotted via spy satellite, to find what is keeping those people alive so a cure can be administered to the rest of the U.K. As if an impending plague wiping out London weren't urgent enough, Eden and her team are given the only-in-the-movies arbitrary time frame of 48 hours to go into the ruins of Glasgow and find the trail of virologist Marcus Kane (McDowell), who'd been working on a cure even after quarantine was imposed.

It seems that those survivors in Glasgow, however, read a few too many of those 2000 A.D. comics from the 1980s. Glasgow is overrun with mohawk-sporting cannibal tribes led by Sol (Conway) and his wicked cute man-eating girlfriend Viper (Liebenberg), who hearken back to the days when mohawks were threatening, and not coifs sported by dodgeball victims on American Idol. Where are Axel Pressbutton, DR and Quinch, and Judge Dredd when you really need them?

A maelstrom of utter trash

Let's get something straight. Doomsday is a huge pile of crap. But it's a glorious huge pile of crap, made with an adoration of crap. This is a love letter to 1980s exploitation movies, the kind so many of us watched courtesy of pirate cable boxes as they fungus-sprouted across those late-night timeslots in the wee hours after The Young Ones and 120 Minutes signed off. There were Proustian moments while I watched Doomsday when I swear I burped up the flavor of Top Ramen and generic beer. These are movies that ripped off The Terminator, The Road Warrior, The Warriors and even Excalibur. I'm talking a gamut of crap, from 1990: The Bronx Warriors to Sword of the Valiant. Like last year's Zodiac, a throwback to 1970s cop movies, and the current The Bank Job, a throwback to 1970s post-Get Carter British gangster movies, Doomsday is a throwback that doesn't feel like a cheap homage or cutesy-pie postmodern pastiche. Doomsady feels like it's from the 1980s, a movie you might see for sale on VHS for two bucks in the media bin at Goodwill.

Doomsday is a quadruple feature. It out-Grindhouses Grindhouse by two whole movies. The first act is a plague movie a la 28 Days Later, with a society tearing itself apart and lots of violence involving rioters like infectious soccer hooligans. The second act is a riff on Escape From New York, complete with a line of cancan-dancing Sawney Bean cannibal wannabes in kilts and a thundering soundtrack provided by Adam and the Ants and Siouxee and the Banshees. The effect is like a blend of Krafft-Ebing, Throwdown with Bobby Flay and a Suicide Girls burlesque show. Then it becomes a demented Excalibur on mescaline, with a stop-off in a quasi-feudal culture full of people who, like the Borgia gang in William F. Nolan's Logan novels, get all medieval on society's ass. Then, because the movie must, it ends in a Road Warrior high-speed combat chase, with shots from The Road Warrior duplicated exactly. Throughout, Marshall assaults us with retina-shredding action and editing and good old-fashioned violence and gore.

Along the way, we're treated to random and pointless and completely welcome quotes from Walter Hill's The Warriors when a Scottish iteration of the Turnbull ACs gang from that movie show up. "CAaAaAaAaAaAaAaAAan you dig it?" To say nothing of the armored carriers lifted right from Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley.

Neil Marshall, who in his werewolf epic Dog Soldiers managed to quote everything from Apocalypse Now to Zulu, has a true love for movies, good ones and bad ones. In an era in which dumbass video and commercial directors get to remake, castrate and mutilate cool old movies, it's nice to see work from a guy who actually likes the movies from which he plunders. Can't wait to see what he does next.