Home Is Where The HELL Is...

Rating: 9/10 (5 December 2008)

When approaching sequels, especially in these dark, writers' strike-filled times, I always feel a sense of nausea, fear and intense loathing. And I'm sure I'm not alone in this...especially after some horrendous cinematic turds like the AVP sequel, (the last one, not the most recent) which looked awesome and played like it had been rewritten by that mentally crippled kid on THE SIMPSONS.
Well, I got the same feeling with 28 WEEKS LATER, only more so, because Danny Boyle in his wonderfully insidious way, had taken the "zombie" genre and stood it on its head, literally, giving us a harrowing, horrifying and downright traumatizing experience not soon to be forgotten. How in the hell is some director you've never heard of with a virtually no-name cast going to hope to equal THAT?
Well, as it turned out, director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (ENTACTO) did one hell of a job, putting his own stamp on an ever-deepening, nightmarish glimpse into a man-made Hell that has no foreseeable exits - no happy endings around the corner here! And in his own, sneaky way, working with co-writers Rowan Joffe, Jesus Olmo and Enrique Lopez Lavigne, Fresnadillo trumps Boyle's insidious gambit by adding just a little something extra...presenting this next chapter in the series in the context of a domestic family/survival drama.
It is exactly 28 weeks after the mind-numbing events of 28 DAYS. London is a ghost town. The last of the infected victims of the rage virus have finally died, most probably from starvation. And working in tandem with the Brits, here we come, the big, bad Yanks to save the day and help clean up and repopulate the eerily quiet streets with Londoners who are anxious to get back to lives that are as normal as possible, under the circumstances.
One of those people is Don (the always-dependable Robert "RAVENOUS" Carlyle), who can't wait to be reunited with his kids, daughter Tammy (Imogen Poots) and young son Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), both of whom were going to school abroad in the U.S. when everything across the pond went 'tits up', and who have been living as refugees since before the "repopulation" effort began. Their reunion is a happy one, but not without a few dark spots. One of them being that their mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack) is not there with Don, having fallen victim to "the infected" during a horrifying attack that opens up the movie.
Alas, but there's much more to the tragic story than that, and what it is, I'm not at liberty to say. Just know that the movie's main plot hangs on what this family has been through, and their story is a real knee-slapper...especially since it serves as the catalyst to reopen "Pandora's box," in a manner of speaking. So I'll just shut the hell up now, except to add that the only thing more shocking than the twists this movie takes is the ultra-bleak ending, somewhat hinted at in the first movie.
Fresnadillo cannily doesn't try to reinvent the remarkably rancid recipe that Boyle established in DAYS, which is a good thing. Mixing virtually unknown actors with vaguely recognizable faces (like Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson in DAYS, and Carlyle, Harold Perrineau and Idris Elba here) lends the sequel that same spooky air of "you-are-there" realism, and he relies more heavily than Boyle did on a very documentary-like look and feel, relying cleverly on several types of visual media that are natural to the story, as well as aiding in driving it forward, (a terrifying sequence in a subway station will stay with you for days.)
The acting, as always, is top-notch, and Carlyle shows again why he seems so much more at home in genre movies than in "veddy, veddy serious" British dramas or indie comedies, (although he's most well known for THE FULL MONTY.)
Technically, what's always made the '28' series a little more disturbing than your average zombie munch-fest is that the monsters in this series are people infected by a virus and not 'really' zombies, which removes that layer of 'fantasy detachment' that comes ready-made with other horror movies. What happens here is a little more feasible and therefore much more unsettling, so you may want to skip this one if you are easily nightmare-prone.
It's unfortunate that Fox Atomic has put plans for 28 YEARS LATER on the back burner, based on the recent non-performance of some other major horror releases, (most of which SUCKED armadillo ass to begin with, but I guess the suits in the front office missed THAT memo.)
In any case, cuddle up on the couch with your loved one for 28 WEEKS LATER in the meantime, and make sure you keep your carbine loaded and at the ready. You know - just in case...