28 Weeks Later review

DVD of the week – The thought-provoking zombie movie 28 Weeks Later is a shocker, not just because it’s a sequel that matches its predecessor.

Whether horror flicks make your skin crawl or your mind wander, 28 Weeks Later will not only make you scared to leave the house, but you’ll also be planning your survival rations and digging an underground shelter in the garden as it sinks into viewers’ brains like an infection of the rage virus.

Following on, unsurprisingly considering the title, from Danny Boyle’s triumphant 28 Days Later, Britain is shown as a barren wasteland inhabited by nothing but rotting corpses, rats and a few survivors in segregated compounds guarded by bored American troops, six months after the rage virus first swept the nation.

While the reconstruction continues in old Blighty, courtesy of the benevolent U.S. Army, the war against the infection has been officially won and the first wave of refugees start returning home to a small patch of London. These include Donald Harris (played by a manically convincing Robert Carlyle) who is reunited with his son Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and daughter Tammy (Imogen Poots) – the first children to return to the quarantined island.

As viewers discover the fate of the kids’ mother (Catherine McCormack), who was sacrificed by their father to a frenzied pack of red-eyed flesh-eating zombies, the tone of the entire film is set when she is discovered alive, but not uninfected allowing for more crazed chase scenes, army ambushes, and terrifying clashes with the ‘infecteds’.

The anti-American, or more specific anti-Bush, political sentiments of director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo are not subtle, including echoes of present-day Iraq to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But thankfully skipping the sanctimonious lectures, the characters are genuinely sympathetic, the motivations are believable and the hysteria is infectious.

By its very nature the original 28 Days Later was unique, but the sequel keeps the audience on edge even more mercilessly, with a swifter pace and grimly more imaginative storyline which ultimately allows for a bleak apocalyptic picture of the future – and potentially a 28 Months Later follow-up.

Matching its predecessor pound for pound, watch 28 Weeks Later and you’ll be digging up the back garden and buying-up tins of Spam before you know it – be warned.

Film: 28 Weeks Later
Directed by: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Starring: Robert Carlyle, Mackintosh Muggleton, Imogen Poots, Catherine McCormack
Classification: 18
Release date: 10 September 2007
Available from: Amazon.co.uk for £12.98

Michelle Byrne
10 September 2007