January 2005. I pick up the phone. It's my editor.

"You want to go to Prague to cover Doom?" he says.

Two things crossed my mind. The first: YES. The second: Doom what? I had heard of Doom the videogame. As a geeky high schooler I played it all the time. Loved it. The shotgun, the chainsaw, the BFG…back then, this is what guys did when they didn't have girlfriends. Or maybe they didn't have girlfriends because they were doing this.

But a Doom movie? Never heard of it. Even though it was starring Karl Urban (Eomer from "Lord of the Rings") and someone called The Rock, Universal had kept this puppy under lock and key, filming in the cold obscurity of Prague, kinda like how Rocky trained in Russia in Rocky IV.

I hadn't heard of Doom the movie. No one had heard of Doom the movie.

"Sure, sure, Doom," I told him. "Right. They're filming in Prague. I'm all over it. Sign me up."

A week later the plane lands in snowy, gloomy Prague. As the cab took me to the Hilton, winding through the icy streets, I soaked in the Charles Bridge, the big cool-lookin'-building-with-two-spikey-towers that's on every postcard, and a bunch of other historic-looking buildings that I'm even less familiar with. Prague is one of those cities that looks better in the snow. Not because it's ugly, like Pittsburgh, but because it seems to match the city's sense of style. It fits.

At the hotel I met the lovely Lauren Bantit from Universal, who would be my guide for the next couple of days. Lauren instructed me to meet the other journalists at 8:00 in the lobby for dinner, and I realized it probably wouldn't be hard to spot eight journalists who were here to visit the set of Doom.

And sure enough, the other Doom-dorks did indeed stand out, easily recognizable amidst the other hotel guests. (I can say this because I'm one of them.) We all became fast friends. Maybe it was our mutual appreciation of the genre. Maybe it was the absinthe.

Oh yes. The set visit. The next morning, escorted by Lauren and the gentlemanly Geoff Freeman, we took a couple of busses to the set, about 30 minutes outside the city's downtown area. Someone more skilled with navigation would probably have a sense of north, south, east, or west, but I felt like Robert Redford in "Sneakers" when tied in the trunk and unsure of his directions. Unlike Redford, though, I didn't have a genius blind man to intuit the bridges that I crossed.

Right, right. The set. Getting there. First off, don't worry. Doom is not filmed on the streets of Prague or anything silly like that. 99% was shot indoors in massive warehouses that they converted to studios. So why film in Prague? Money. Filming in Prague means cheaper facilities, cheaper talent, cheaper unions, and all the absinthe you can drink.

Shivering in my scarf and overcoat, I'm led into the ginormous converted warehouse. It's been about seven years since I geeked out with the original video game, but right away I recognized the world of Doom. Narrow corridors stretched in each direction. Dark. Flickering lights added to the creepiness.

Further down the corridor, director Andrzej Bartkowiak is working with The Rock. It's the final day of principal photography, and The Rock is carrying the BFG. (Anyone who's remotely familiar with Doom knows what BFG stands for.)

"We're all KILLERS here," The Rock says with a scowl.

Nope. Doesn't work for Bartkowiak.

"We're ALL killers here," The Rock says.

Nope. Take three.

"We're ALL KILLERS here."

Take four.

"We're all killers here," The Rock says, squinting his eyes with just a hint of menace, and this time he nails it. Cut. Next line.

While The Rock works on his last few lines, the other Doom-dorks and I check out the rest of the scenery, scribbling in our little notebooks as if we're doing real work. I'll give Bartkowiak this. The set's hot. Dark and scary without being campy. And it looks real. The more I talked to the effects guys, the more I realized that they're avoiding CGI whenever possible. Lots of fake corpses on the ground, lots of prosthetic monsters, lots of bullet holes in the corridor walls.

It looks like what a Doom set should look like.

We chat with Tom McAdams, military advisor, who's actually seen plenty of real combat and is here to instruct Urban and The Rock on how to hold weapons, how to move, how to act in firefights. He shows us a rack of weapons, and most of them look like real military firearms as opposed to space-age gizmos.

Which is consistent with the overall tone and direction of Doom the movie. Early on in the project, fans panicked. The film is loosely--loosely--based on the story for Doom 3, which is set in the future and takes place on Mars.

In the movie, the shoot-'em-up action takes place on some fictional planet, not Mars. This had fans in an uproar. Please. Does the name of the planet really make a difference? For that matter, doesn’t it stretch credulity that we'll soon be on Mars?

Another key difference. In the game, the demons are from Hell. Not figuratively. Not allegorically. They're literally from "Hell," as in Heaven and Hell and all that good stuff. Maybe that makes sense if you're Paul W.S. Anderson and you're directing "Event Horizon."

God knows how it'll turn out, but Bartkowiak isn't gunning for "Event Horizon." He's thinking more like the early "Alien" films, and this means grounding the film in some sort of reality. No Mars. No Hell. No way the writers (Dave Callaham and Wesley Strick) will avoid getting lynched by fans.

Speaking of "Alien," one of the producers, the peppy Jeremy Steckler, tells us that Doom will be a "Hard R." No compromises, he assured us.

After awkwardly picking up the weapons and pretending we knew what we were doing, we met up with Jon Farhat, VFX Producer. He can relate to the wrath of the fans. "Somehow my e-mail address got out, and I get e-mails from Doomers. And you wouldn’t believe the stuff they say. 'Will the doors have that same sound?' You know it’s been the same since the first game. And a lot of e-mails like, 'You better not fuck it up like the other games.'"

One thing Doom has to distinguish it from other game-to-movies ("Resident Evil," "Tomb Raider"), though, is the eagerly-anticipated 1st person shooter segment. Back in January they didn’t' have any footage to show us, or maybe we just didn't ask nice enough, but Farhat spoke some about the segment.

According to Farhat, the most difficult element to translate to the 1st person segment was the actual layout of the screen. "In the game you have this square aspect ratio. In the movie you have this widescreen, so where do you put the guns?" The segment runs about four minutes, and yes, there is an explanation of how we come to see the world through the eyes of the main character, Reaper.

After talking with The Rock and Karl Urban (full Q&As below), we bussed to another studio and took in some more laboratories and more dark corridors. We met the Creature Effects Supervisor, John Rosengrant, who delighted in telling us all about "The Baron."

Who is "The Baron?" We don't really know. But he's a bad guy. A really bad guy. Or a monster, technically. He's slimey and scaley and makes Gollum look like Keira Knightley.

Apparently this Baron character is something of a big deal. Happily, he's not made out of CGI, but instead he's brought to life through several different costumes, robotics, and old-school prosthetics.

For those of you with girlfriends, John Rosengrant is a big name in the world of creatures and special effects. He's worked on the original "Terminator," "Aliens," "Predator," "The Lost World," "Interview With the Vampire" and "Terminator 3."

Rosengrant encapsulates everything we know so far about Doom. The dialogue is a question mark--could go either way. The story--which involves a distress call, an attempted rescue mission, and shooting shitloads of nasty monsters--is lean enough. And as you'll read in Karl Urban's interview below, the characters, or at least his, might even have some depth. Who knows?

Thanks to Rosengrant, though, and to the sober darkness of the film's visual effects, the film should at least LOOK good. And for a slasher horror/action film, that counts for a lot.

After we finished up on the set, I had some time to kill in Prague.

This is another story for another time, but in the next 48 hours I got drunk and lost $80 playing blackjack. Then, in a moment of sober lucidity, I realized that my math was wrong on the foreign currency exchange--I was off by a decimal point--and I actually lost eight HUNDRED dollars playing blackjack. Oops. The next day, instead of sight-seeing, I spent cooped up in the hotel room and wondered why I had that final shot of absinthe.

After that the trip was fairly uneventful, except when my digital camera was pick-pocketed by a Prague hooker.

Bring on Doom!