British filmmaker Neil Marshall exploded onto the screen early last decade with the cult classic “Dog Soldiers” and followed it up with the outright classic “The Descent”.
A few years after that he tried going bigger budget with the Rhona Mitra and Bob Hoskins-led “Doomsday,” a UK-set riff on “Escape from New York” but in this case Scotland was the walled off dangerous land that had to be entered to obtain a macguffin (a pandemic cure) and get out.
Made with a sequel in mind, the film underperformed when it opened back in 2008 and sadly nothing further came of a follow-up. This past weekend a screening and Q & A with Marshall was held in which he discussed some ideas he had for the follow-up including one involving Mitra’s Major Sinclair finding her mother. He tells Slashfilm:
“I had an idea for a part two. There was a sequence involving helicopter gunships attacking the castle [from the third act], which I knew I couldn’t properly do for this one. I thought, Oh, I’ll save that for the next one. I should’ve used for that [first] one. [Laughs] The story was going to involve our hero character, Sinclair, ending up in Newcastle upon Tyne, my hometown. There’s a border town, and she discovers her mom is still alive and running her own kind of gang there. She’s gone a bit fucking mental as well. Beyond that, I haven’t really thought about it.”
Marshall says he hasn’t forgotten the importance of the film though, probably his most high profile failure to date – “I learned a s–t load from the failure of this film, more than any other film.” Marshall followed it up with “Centurion” and has since become a very high in demand TV director for his notable work on the likes of “Game of Thrones,” “Hannibal” and “Black Sails”.
