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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