Doomsday, written and directed by Neil Marshall (previously best known for the spelunking gorefest The Descent), is the kind of film that will strongly remind viewers of The Matrix. It’s not just that the fast cars, high-flying stunts, post-apocalyptic world and stony dark-haired heroine in a skintight black outfit will bring to mind Keanu Reeves. It’s that after no more than five minutes of Doomsday, you’ll be asking yourself, “Why can’t I be watching something intelligent, like The Matrix?”

The headlining feature of the widescreen single-disc DVD (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, MSRP: $29.98) is that it contains both the film’s theatrical version and a second, unrated version, presumably to showcase Doomsday in all its dubious, bunny-annihilating glory. The unrated version does not include subtitles or closed captioning, though, which can make the film’s array of post-apocalyptic Scottish accents hard for Americans to interpret, but it’s not exactly a movie that cares whether anyone hears the dialogue.

The premise of Doomsday is that a mysterious virus, whose symptoms look exactly like smallpox but which for some reason isn’t smallpox, has completely ravaged Scotland but somehow hasn’t made its way south to England. The British government imposes a permanent quarantine, effortlessly imprisoning the Scots with a line of corrugated aluminum and a few automated machine guns (that’s where the bunny annihilation comes in). The last human to escape the contamination zone, a little girl who somehow gets her eye shot out without suffering any brain or facial damage, grows into a stone-faced commando killer who wears an eyepatch over her removable cybernetic eye for reasons that are never entirely clear. When the virus reappears in an unfashionable portion of London and satellite photos show evidence of survivors in Scotland, professional sociopath Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra, who also plays Lara Croft at video game trade shows) is dispatched to find a cure. She takes with her a team of disposable Brits in body armor and, when she thinks about it, the memory of her lost past.

Once they’ve blowtorched their way through the wall (Scotland has apparently lost the use of doors), Sinclair and her team encounter a horde of flesh-eating psychopaths straight out of Thunderdome. Cue a lot of car chases, explosions and decapitations. Doomsday is best enjoyed if one doesn’t think too hard about anything. Like, for example, how a group of post-apocalyptic savages luckily managed to include both so many gifted professional tattoo artists and someone who knew how to make zippers for all that bondage clothing. Or how no one in this kill-or-be-killed world has yet thought of yanking out an opponent’s facial piercings during a fight. Or how the utopian medieval society flourishing in a country castle managed to find a trained professional blacksmith and a small army of people to sew all those complicated court costumes, all without the benefit of electricity. Or how the buses, motorcycles and Bentleys are all running without gasoline.

The acting barely merits a mention, with Mitra providing all the emotional range of an action figure and all but the cuddliest member of her squad dying conveniently and nastily on cue. The film belongs, whenever he wants it, to Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, “Heroes”), in the role of the disillusioned scientist and medieval tyrant who supposedly holds the secret of the cure. McDowell, an old pro and veteran of many B movies far worse than this, breathes life into the corpse of his script and manages to make his few scenes memorable.

The unrated DVD includes a commentary by Marshall and four cast members and a few featurettes. “Anatomy of Catastrophe: Civilization on the Brink” includes a lot of artistic posturing consisting of cast and crew members trying desperately to convince themselves that a bad mash-up of The Road Warrior, Escape from New York and 28 Days Later can still be a wholly original film (only McDowell seems to do this with the requisite irony). There’s another doc on the film’s visual effects “wizardry”--“The Visual Effects of Doomsday”--which is commensurate with anything that can be seen on the Sci Fi channel on Saturday night, with a special feature on how the exploding rabbit was created and how to blow up a bus. Finally, “Devices of Death” focuses on the guns and gadgets of Doomsday, most noticeably a roadster covered with human skin and an assortment of Mad Max-style weapons made out of latex.

While the premise of Doomsday and the moral implications of its vision of the future might have been interesting in the hands of a more original screenwriter or director, the movie ultimately chooses carnage over consideration, and that’s where most audiences will get off. For a little under two hours of nonstop explosions and spraying innards, Doomsday is occasionally amusing. For anything else, it’s two hours of your life that you will not get back.

Doomsday is now available on DVD.