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Zombies, viruses, sequels, and horror satires are beat, so you’re skipping this. But 28 Weeks Later and its crazy director scare to impress

By Zach Stephenson

Guess you won’t be seeing this, right? It’s probably been 28 days since the last me-too zombie movie slogged into theatres. And then there was Grindhouse, the biggest disappointment since you were born. Robert Rodriguez couldn’t even get the zombies right in that, so he called them “sickos” and he went ahead and showed Tarantino dangling his balls before he jerked off to a clique of ragging stuntwomen for an hour in Death Proof. And besides, this is a sequel to 28 Days Later, which started off brutal enough until the last third ruined it with sociological boredom. Forget this movie, you’re finishing up university or shaping your mashed potatoes into something resembling the answer, not reading Fangoria at your mom’s house like Harry Knowles’ brother Frank Knowles. Right? Right, bitch?

Which brings us to 28 Weeks Later; compared to Danny Boyle’s earlier outing, these “infecteds” are like Eric Roberts to his sister. It’s a pretty nice whacked-out surprise, mixing the inventive action and Iraq parallels of Children of Men (but dicing off its weak, optimistic ending) with the no-time-for-existentialism-too-real dread and horror of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Throw in a decent budget version of Night of the Comet-type colony collapse, set it across the pond just like 28 Days, and this might be one of the only movies—Superbad aside—you remember liking, or even remember, all summer. I’m not kidding, I was shocked too.

Now, Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead from 2004 is renown for having the best opening of any horror movie—zombies, sequels, remakes, whatever—ever. Successfully shocking an audience with the undead and making them experience something new is partially why the guy landed 300. It’s clear Spanish director and co-writer Juan Fresnadillo wants that crown and he goes for it with macabre, unrestrained zest. The guy is a nut. He grew up watching the lizard kingdoms in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain rather than the typical Golden Age Spielberg and he eventually went on to make a short starring that eccentric visionary. The construct of Hollywood sequels doesn’t allow him to catapult the same level of surprise or newness on the audience during the film’s first minutes, but he comes close. Having the protagonist, Don, abandon his wife and some kid to be torn apart as he peels across a grassy field like a total wanker is a good move.

Better still, Fresnadillo quickly outpaces the exhausting plot structure of Snyder’s Dead by allowing all of his characters to die at anytime while placing them in a constant state of local-motion sans a few creepy breathers in between. 28 Weeks Later is not the box office hit that Snyder’s Dead remake was, but Fresnadillo will turn out to be as influential and sought after, there’s no doubt.

Before the nasty virus from the first film returns here half a year later, U.S.-led NATO forces have quarantined off Britain leaving a safe Green Zone, surrounding streets empty and corpses rotting in nearby pizza parlors. When all hell breaks loose again, NATO’s decision makers are forced to downsize their expectations, continually authorizing more and more mass casualties until total extermination comes up fast. What starts out as a well-choreographed riot of zombies as seen from the roof-top perspective of government snipers picking them off, turns into a bloodbath when these gunmen are ordered to kill every last pedestrian in the streets. So, on top a virus that makes Ebola look like Frank Knowles and raging zombie fuckers lurking and pouncing, all of the characters have to avoid The Man at his breaking point, as they run around in massive, bleak settings echoing with total desertion. I know, so what, but you have to see it.

Don’t worry. This is not a horror film with dreams of going to grad school and delivering a dissertation covered in puss-and-blood. And it doesn’t get John Romero-style satirical either or pretend that zombies and allegory just met. That’d be horrible. Like the best haunted houses this movie delivers scares via tense action and a few shocks, but it antes up so many times that you’ll forget which is which. In the end, it’s a B-movie that nearly achieves A-film status, by exceeding at the one basic goal of horror: scaring you. That it’s original with a new frantic stylishness that never metrosexualizes, downgrades or overdoes the film or its genre’s primal instincts is sweet. Too bad you probably won’t be seeing it.

This discourse of 28 Weeks Later is written by Zach Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.