![]() Fresnadillo and co-screenwriters Rowan Joffe, E.L. Is the movie a classic? I don’t think so, but it’s terrifying-and a necessary gross-out. Parents go in an instant from protecting their children to trying to munch on them, and no government rescue is forthcoming. But unlike the benevolent universe of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds remake, this one offers little hope for survival. The young’uns end up in a new surrogate family, led by a farsighted military doctor (Rose Byrne) and a Special Forces sniper (Jeremy Renner) unable to pull the trigger on innocents. By no means is everyone a zombie or a zombielike combatant. When the shit hits the helicopter blades, American higher-ups tell their soldiers they “cannot be target-specific.” And so we watch these men-as crazy-scared as everyone else-let loose with bullets and firebombs and chemical weapons. This is literally a take-no-prisoners movie, insofar as once the zombie-cannibal contagion menaces the populace again, there’s no time to distinguish among the uninfected and the feral. What happens next is the worst that can happen. The brother and sister take their father’s weaselly lies about their mother’s death badly, and-being idiot young people in a horror movie-slip out into the city to inspect their old home. Life is by no means normal, but the outbreak is contained, and British refugees are starting to trickle back into the country, among them Carlyle’s kids (played by Mackintosh Muggleton-a great Harry Potterish name-and Imogen Poots-another great Harry Potterish name). Twenty-eight weeks later, the zombie cannibals have exhausted their food supply and died of starvation, Britain is virtually depopulated, and Don resides in a high-rise city-within-a-city-a London “green zone” guarded by the U.S. Their swiftness forces split-second decisions-in this case one in which a weak patriarch, Don (Robert Carlyle), abandons to the monstrous hordes his wife (Catherine McCormack) and a boy she’s shielding, setting a new record for the 600-yard dash in the direction of the river. These are not Romero’s loping dead, who now seem rather quaint. The prologue plays like the film’s predecessor distilled into a few ferocious minutes: dark, boarded-up farmhouse of survivors malignant daylight as zombies break through doors and windows and the rocking, pixelated frenzy of snarls and blazing eyes and showers of blood. And as for the charge that they are grossly, cynically exploitive: No zombie movie worth its salt isn’t.Ģ8 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo ( Intacto), is blistering and nihilistic-a vision to reduce you to a puddle of despair. Horror films aren’t bound by the wussy tenets of realism or journalistic faux-objectivity. ![]() In 2005, Joe Dante and Sam Hamm collaborated on a film for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series called Homecoming: a bloody madcap satire in which dead vets burst out of their flag-draped coffins (hidden from the public by the Bushies) to cast votes against the Iraq war. Even film snobs have accepted that George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a spookhouse mirror of social and familial upheaval in the late sixties and that Bob Clark’s Dead of Night-about the corpse of a Vietnam soldier who returns home to his grief-stricken parents-is at least as evocative as David Rabe’s fine, much-heralded play Sticks and Bones. How uplifting to see that zombie movies like the new 28 Weeks Later-the incendiary follow-up to 28 Days Later-can be both juicy splatterfests and vehicles for stinging political commentary: It validates my faith in the disreputable.
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