British filmmaker Neil Marshall earned a legion of new fans with 2005's The Descent, a genuinely scary flick that put me, for one, off spelunking forever. And for his next act? An energetic but derivative apocalyptic adventure that Rogue Pictures has unceremoniously dumped into theaters without press screenings or even much promotion.

Being one of Hollywood's Shameful Secrets™ (movies not screened for critics before they open) gives a film a certain stench, and it's too bad that Doomsday is stuck with it. It's not great -- I'm not even sure I'd call it "good" -- but the studios have certainly screened films that were worse. Heck, the studios have screened films that were worse this week (including one whose name rhymes with Mever Mack Mown). Doomsday is perfectly acceptable as a C+ movie, the kind that you don't see on purpose but that will certainly amuse you if you happen to stumble into the theater accidentally.

It begins with florid narration by Malcolm McDowell, who tells us that a horrific virus -- subtly called the Reaper Virus -- wiped out much of England. Then a wall was built to divide the infected northern half of Britain from the clean southern half, and all the sick people up north were left to die in chaos. "Social order decayed along with the corpses," McDowell says.

Actress Rhona Mitra is definitely no stranger to the ways of the law. She spent a good deal of time on The Practice, and then jumped ship for the ultra-wacky law show Boston Legal. Since then, well, she's not only got nipped and tucked, but she's taken some time for Skinwalkers, the flop that is The Number 23, and Shooter. Now The Hollywood Reporter has posted that she's going to co-star in a new indie thriller called The Boy in the Box -- written by actor Glenn Taranto and helmed by Anders Anderson.

No, this is not a retro celebrity biopic about Corey Hart. Rather, it's about a "small-town police chief (Jon Hamm, We Were Soldiers ) determined to discover the truth behind the mummified remains of a boy who was murdered a half-century earlier." Mummification -- that's not something that pops up in a thriller every day. Or in life for that matter. Anyway, Mitra will play "the police chief's wife, who is trying to move on after the disappearance of their own son eight years earlier." No wonder he's obsessed.

But there's even more cast on this sucker. The film is re-teaming Mitra with Sweet Home Alabama co-star Josh Lucas, who will play the slain child's dad. I imagine that means flashbacks -- since Lucas sure as hell isn't old enough to have a son who has been dead for 50 years. Wrapping things up, there's Dawson Leary / James Van Der Beek, Marcus Thomas (You Kill Me), the young tyke Jimmy Bennett (Evan Almighty) -- who I imagine will play the slain kid, and Jessica Chastain (Law and Order). I'll just go out on a limb and say Dawson did it! He's got a good creepy look to him when he wants to. As for you Buffy and Grey's fans out there, Box also has the vengeance demon/overachieving doctor Kali Rocha.

It'll be a little while before this film gets up and running. Having tackled the skinwalkers, Mitra is about to head for New Zealand and face lycans in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.

There's a funny moment about twenty minutes into Skinwalkers, when a balding protagonist, played by Elias Koteas, has to explain what's going on to a confused Rhona Mitra. "We're called Skinwalkers," he says. "You would call us werewolves." Oh, thanks. That clears it up. It turns out that Mitra's character is more or less the only non-wolf character in the entire film. She's caught in the middle of an idealogical war between opposing clans of werewolves, some of whom believe that being a werewolf is a bad thing and want an out, and those on the other side who believe being a wolf is fun and have formed themselves into a motorcycle gang of marauding lycanthropes. There's a nice little moment when a pistol-packing granny throws down against the gang when they ride into town looking for trouble, but I'm already stretching to be nice. The good moments are actually few and far between. Only Stan Winston completists or late-to-the-party casting agents wanting a good look at Mitra in action will find much on offer here.

The entire premise of a war between reluctant and self-righteous monsters has already been done (and better) by the X-Men series, which is the obvious inspiration here. There's even a blatant rip-off in the form of a 'boy cure,' which was the plot-engine in the third X-Men film. (To be totally fair, Skinwalkers could have been written long before that film, for all I know.) The boy in this film, played by Matthew Knight, has some kind of special, rare blood that can turn werewolves back into men, or something like that, so he was long ago spirited away to a small town to live with his in-the-dark mother, played by Mitra, all the while secretly protected by good wolves who never let anyone know they're even wolves at all. At night, these good wolves strap themselves into harnesses so that when the moon is full and they wolf-out (thanks to the drama coach in Teen Wolf for that phrase) they won't cause damage. Every night, from sundown to sunup, they howl and thrash, harmlessly.

The last casting announcement we got from the sci-fi thriller Doomsday, was an exclusive from the director Neil Marshall (The Descent), to our own Chris Ullrich. Now Empire Online has reported that Malcolm McDowell is the latest addition to the cast. The story takes place 30 years after a plague has wiped out a good chunk of the population; inspiring a quarantine that mainly entails walling off the infected. Of course, the virus doesn't stay contained for very long and an elite team is put together to stop the disease from spreading. Written and directed by Marshall, the film also stars Bob Hoskins, Rhona Mitra, and Alexander Siddig. McDowell has signed on to play Kane, a global expert on the virus who advises the team on how to fight the spread of the disease.

It seems slightly out of character to have McDowell in a good-guy role in a film. Despite his varied career, nobody can play the steely-eyed villain like McDowell. Well, maybe Paul Bettany, but I guess that example might not really count. McDowell is currently doing his bad-guy best as Linderman on the NBC series Heroes right now, but there is no solid word on whether his work on the show is firmly in the guest star camp, or whether he has signed on for the long haul. Production on Doomsday began back in February, and between his turn as Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie's Halloween remake later this year and his possible TV commitments, it looks like we will be seeing plenty of McDowell soon.

One of the cool things about working here at Cinematical is that we often get info on films, casting, directors and the like before it gets announced to the rest of the world. Such is the case today with some casting news about director Neil Marshall's latest film, Doomsday. As I reported before, the pic currently stars the super-hot Rhona Mitra, and now, according to our new info, she will be joined in the film by the Oscar-nominated actor Bob Hoskins. The post-apocalyptic pic, also being written by Marshall, concerns a lethal virus that has spread throughout a major country and wiped out most of the populace. To contain the virus, authorities enforce a brutal quarantine by walling-off the infected parts of the country.

This puts an end to the threat, until it resurfaces years later in another major city, forcing an elite team of specialists, led by Eden Sinclair (played by Mitra), to enter the quarantine area on a desperate mission to find a cure. Hoskins will play cop Bill Nelson, who nominates Mitra's character for the perilous mission and monitors her progress while giving, one would assume, nuggets of wisdom and aide along the way. In addition to Hoskins, other cast members include e Alexander Siddig, recently of Fox's 24, as well as previous Marshall alumni such as Sean Pertwee and MyAnna Buring. Production on the film begins February 9.

Right up front I'll say that Neil Marshall's horror film The Descent is one hell of a scary piece of filmmaking. I've seen a few horror films in my time (ok, more than a few) but this one actually scared me at many points while I was watching it. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say The Descent is one of the scariest, most well done, horror films I've seen in many years. Certainly, it's far superior to the majority of the Splat-packing Saw clones we've been graced with at the theaters of late.

Plus, keep in mind that The Descent was not Marshall's first film. He also directed the very impressive, but less scary, Dog Soldiers. So, The Descent was no fluke; this guy has got some talent. That said, what does my nominee for best horror director of the last few years do for an encore? Not another horror film, exactly -- although from the description it does seem to have some horror elements. Instead, according to Sci-Fi Wire, Marshall will follow up The Descent with a futuristic action thriller called Doomsday for Rogue Pictures and producers Steven Paul and Benedict Carver.

Marshall will also be writing the script for Doomsday, which tells a story set three decades after a biological catastrophe that leads citizens of a city to close themselves off from the rest of the world by building a large wall around their city. Then, when the biological agent that caused the catastrophe resurfaces in another country, an elite group is sent to that country to find a cure. In addition to Marshall's involvement with Doomsday, it was also announced that the stunning Rhona Mitra, recently of the TV series Nip/Tuck and the upcoming films Skinwalkers and The Number 23 with Jim Carrey, will be joining the cast of Doomsday. Mitra will play the leader of the elite team sent into the plague-ridden wasteland in search of the cure.

As a huge fan of Marshall, his films and the super-hot Rhona Mitra, I'm especially interested in seeing this. To me, it sounds like Marshall is combining the best elements of The Descent and Dog Soldiers to make this new film. If he's successful (and I have every confidence he will be) Doomsday could definitely turn out to be a worthy successor to The Descent. No word on other casting but production is scheduled to begin in early 2007.

For his follow-up to the tepidly received comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, Jim Carrey will make one of his periodic forays into the world of drama, as the star of Joel Schumacher's The Number 23. The film, described as "psychological thriller," is the story of a man who, upon reading an "obscure book" called The Number 23, becomes convinced that the book is about him. His obsession with the book and number escalates "to the point that he...realizes that the book forecasts far graver consequences for his life than he could ever have imagined." Oooooh.

Despite the fact that the IMDB lists the film as completed, it's only just finalizing its cast and won't even start shooting until Monday. Though Elisabeth Shue was originally cast as Carrey's wife, she's about to be replaced (presumably because she's pregnant) by Sideways star Virginia Madsen. Also just added was Rhona Mitra, who will play "Suicide Girl," a character from the book.

While the story sounds potentially interesting, the presence of Schumacher is a wild card at best - when was the last time he made a tight, solid thriller?

[via Cinema Blend]