The opening eight minutes or so of the sequel to non-zombie zombie apocalypse flick 28 Days Later are some of the most brutal and terrifying in cinema. The infected victims of the Rage virus, of course, arent technically zombies: theyre alive, for starters, and what makes them so terrifying is their relentless, savage, screaming, gibbering, sprinting homicidal presence in the films. They dont represent anything, and theyre not a metaphor: theyre just horrifying. Robert Carlyles Don is a coward who abandoned his wife Alice to be murdered or worse, infected but the films opening sequence shows us in graphic detail why he would do that, and depicts the agony he feels in one heart-shaking close-up of his face. From the moment the infected break into the farmhouse that he and Alice and a group of survivors have been hiding in to the moment that, soundtracked breathlessly by the gathering storm clouds of Godspeed! You Black Emperors East Hastings, he runs to the river, pursued by what looks like dozens of infected, to escape alone, the movie grabs you by the throat and dares you to look away. And then theres the rest of it. 28 Weeks Later is, technically speaking, just as compelling throughout. Its violent, gory and nerve-wracking, just what youd hope for from a movie of this type and yet the ridiculous elements drag the audience out of the film, rendering it more or less forgettable an hour later. Elements like the infected Don stalking his family become silly rather than scary, the character constantly popping up like a garden variety serial killer in a bad movie, and the helicopter set-piece at the end is actually hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Whats more, the first acts bare statement that after five weeks the infected had all starved to death makes a mockery of the post-apocalyptic vibe of the two-film franchise: if all it takes is to block off a few streets and wait a month to contain the outbreak, its not much of an end of the world scenario. These are infected people, after all not supernatural creatures. Enact martial law, shoot em all and burn the bodies. Job done.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
