Best Horror Movie of the Year...(so far)

Rating: 9/10 (21 May 2007)

I've never been that big a fan of the original '28 Days Later'. It was a brilliant premise, excellently directed by Danny Boyle, and really injected something fresh and genuinely terrifying into the zombie genre (I know they're not really zombies, but the Infected populate the zombie genre). But the second half was awful, with a distinctly uncomfortable performance from Chris Eccleston. Megan Burns, as the teenage Hannah, was such an unbelievable bad actor that she managed to make almost every scene in which she appeared unwatchable. I've seen more realism and conviction in a primary school nativity play. It's sad that one performance should ruin an entire movie, but so spectacularly bad was young Burns that '28 Days Later' was consumed by the fire of her incompetence.
And so here we have a sequel, lazily titled '28 Weeks Later', coming from the MTV-Horror studio of Fox Atomic and created by a bunch of virtual first timers. Expectations are very low indeed. It's even more shocking, therefore, to discover that the movie is not only far superior to the first, but the best and most satisfying horror film since 'The Descent'.
The opening act, set in an isolated farmhouse, is an incredibly tense and visceral set piece of frenetic camera work and almost strobe-like editing that perfectly captures the feral ferocity of the Infected. The hand-held digital camera-work and over-saturated photography are beautiful; the performances are all solid; the special effects virtually flawless.
There are some really deep plot holes, the more unkind viewer may call them cavernous  it's really quite unbelievable that two children would be able to simply sneak out of a military quarantine in broad daylight, or that a building janitor would have security access to the deepest levels of biomedical containment, or that the French would not bother to guard the Channel Tunnel. But such inconsistencies failed to really bother me, so swept up was I in the dreamlike vision of an abandoned and depopulated London. To see something so familiar become so alien never ceases to fascinate, and I was more than happy to overlook a plot hole for the chance to see just one more sweeping shot of deserted terraced streets and garbage collecting in newsagents' doorways.
The Infected themselves are one of the most remarkable creations in the history of horror movies. They don't grow large teeth and claws or really transform in to anything supernatural or monstrous. They're still very much human, and recognizable so, and their mindless ferocity is all the more terrifying because of it  a raw and primal expression of the Freudian Id that is far scarier than any CGI monster. As such, the Infected are perhaps the purest horror-move expression of evil yet created. This franchise really could run for a very long time, and if they manage to maintain the creative quality of this one (with a little more attention to those plot holes) then I for one will be buying my ticket on opening day.