The Doom Busters had its world première 7 March at the Glasgow Film Festival for FrightFest
It is 1940. Britain is engaged in a World War abroad. Meanwhile back in idyllic rural Bramble Ridge, those men who are not fit to fight have instead joined the local Home Guard as volunteers, where they engage in endless amateurish manoeuvres and war games against imaginary foes, tilting at windmills while wishing – at least some of them – for real action. They are essentially “Dad’s Army”, made famous by the popular sitcom of the same name that was broadcast over nine series on BBC1 between 1968 and 1977. Yet Arthur Roundtree (Tom Bailey), William Buxton (Timothy Renouf) and Harold Nibley (Oscar Meyrick) are not old retirees, but rather young men held back from combat by illness and injury.
Sent by their Zone Commander (Maureen Bennett) – who is also Arthur’s nan – on a mission to hunt scarecrows dressed as SS officers in nearby Westwood Forest, the three are joined by farm girl Edith Green (Jessica Webber) who is more familiar with the terrain and similarly looking for adventure. Yet what we know from the start – and they do not – is that something else, fallen from the sky, is also out hunting in the woods, and bloodily efficient at it, even as the very oddly behaved military nurse Gail Haywood (Margaret Clunie) robotically observes their antics and circles in. Do these ridiculous, rejected soldiers, armed with mops and brooms, have enough pluck and heroism to save not just themselves, but the world, from a cosmic predator even more dangerous than the German enemy?
“It’s coming for the cheese,” declares Gail of the ferocious creature that they have baited – but her line also sounds like a declaration of intent. For despite numerous references not just to folk horror, but to the Alien, Predator, Species and Terminator franchises, The Doom Busters is, from its punning title down, pantomime of the cheesiest variety. As these characters walk the woods to the accompaniment of the tune from The Teddy Bear’s Picnic, take repeated breaks for tea, confront toothy death with an inevitably ironised Wilhelm scream, and face monsters while tripping out on glowing mushrooms, their DIY can-do attitude is a mirror to the film itself, which makes do with a severely rationed budget to tell a story on a global, even interstellar scale.
The characters are broad, the effects are absurdly lo-fi, and the innuendo comes thick and fast – which is to say that writer/director Jack McHenry is tapping into the same deep vein of English nostalgia that fuelled his retro debut feature Here Comes Hell (2019). Still, there is something timeless, which is to say utterly relevant today, in this vision of a green and pleasant Little Engand beleaguered by Nazism and monstrousness from both without and within. For when push comes to shove and doom is on the horizon (as it ever is), we all must contend with whether we would be St George or the dragon.
strap: Jack McHenry’s World War II sci-fi comedy pits a plucky if hapless Home Guard against a monstrous invader
© Anton Bitel
