28 Days Later (2003)

While borrowing heavily from a handful of films, most notably Romero’s “Dead” trilogy and his rarely seen “The Crazies”, at this stage in the game it’s damn hard not to make a film without several similarities to others being apparent, especially in an apocalyptic zombie/virus flick like this.

Hospital patient Jim awakens from a coma and finds the whole world has been practically abandoned. Amidst some wonderful shots of a deserted London, Jim wanders the streets in search of any sign of life. Newspapers blowing in the streets scream headlines of a deadly virus outbreak, with underlying stories of mad mobs and mass looting taking place across the entire country. The virus in question is the “rage virus” and was accidentally sprung from a government lab ala “The Stand”. Taking only thirty seconds for infection to set in, the infected individual displays extreme amounts of rage; killing any living thing they come in contact with. These guys are more like the undead supermen from say, “City of the Walking Dead” in that they aren’t really zombies per se, just infected dudes with red eyes who are really, really pissed off. They also puke up blood quite regularly…why I don’t know, but they do. Contamination occurs by being bitten or scratched by an infected person or by getting any of their blood in your eyes, mouth, etc. Eventually Jim stumbles into a church that is full of dead bodies as well as several that are seemingly “alive”, these being persons that are infected. Jim luckily escapes and hooks up with several other survivors including a tough twenty-something chemist named Selena, and a kindly taxi cab driver and his fourteen-year old daughter. Our little group roams the English countryside, trying to track down a military unit that’s broadcasting messages on a short-wave frequency, claiming that they offer safety to anyone who is not yet infected.

“28 Days Later” worked due to one important reason and one that is typically overlooked in many horror films…the audience truly grows to care for the characters involved. The filmmakers thankfully avoid the typical clichés, and the scenes of Jim discovering his dead parents were actually quite touching. No one here wanders off alone to take a pee or some other idiotic thing, and boy was that a relief. These characters are intelligent and react as any of us would if faced with the same scenario. My only gripe was that they seemed to be massively unarmed, save for a baseball bat and a machete. I would have been packing some mucho firepower ala the SWAT team guys from “Dawn of the Dead”. Reason being, the infected are truly awesome killing machines, these fuckers run at you like a college frat boy OD’d on adrenaline and viagra would to a drunk and naked virgin coed. On a philosophical level, there are some really deep issues on display here if you care to find them, and the film was released perfectly in sync with society’s latest paranoia of SARS, mad cow disease, and terrorist attacks. A minor complaint on the technical side, the films shot on video format left things at times to dark to make anything out, and this unfortunately occurred during key action sequences which left you squinting your eyes and thinking “what the hell is happening?” Knowing horror aficionados will pick up on all the Romero references, such as a chained up zombie ala “Day of the Dead” and a shopping sequence (sans firepower) from “Dawn”. "28 Days Later" is one of the better horror films that have come out in the past couple of years.