GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 6/25/03)

It's been widely reported that 2003 is going to be a big year for horror films — Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses finally debuted recently; an a priori ill-advised remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre looms (I can just see lead Jessica Biel taunting Leatherface, Neutrogena-commercial style: "Check it out. No, really, check it out"); Wes Craven's reuniting with Kevin Williamson for Cursed; Freddy vs. Jason; Exorcist: The Beginning; etc., etc. But you don't usually see 28 Days Later listed on roundups of this year's horror movies, and I think I understand why. After all, it's produced by Andrew Macdonald and directed by Danny Boyle, two thirds of the team that brought us Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and A Life Less Ordinary. Word that they had teamed up with novelist Alex Garland (whose book The Beach Boyle and Macdonald took on with screenwriter John Hodge in 2000; though the critical fizzle that greeted its release was perhaps humbling, the film itself is in fact pretty decent) to make a movie about a postapocalyptic England besieged by zombie variants probably created expectations of a cheeky pastiche rather than a "real" horror movie. Filmmakers this knowing, the conventional wisdom holds, would deliver a sharp spoof with some sinew stuck in its teeth, at best.

Like hell. 28 Days Later is the genuine article, a hard-core horror picture from start to finish. Zombie's fannish Corpses winks at the audience far more than this picture does; 28 Days contains about as many winks as Cries and Whispers. While 28 Days utilizes a lot of the conventions of the genre and contains specific echoes of some of its antecedents — one character (played by Naomie Harris) may bring to mind Rosalind Cash in The Omega Man, for instance, and a free shopping spree around the film's midpoint is clearly indebted to Dawn of the Dead — it doesn't ever get cute on you. This is a punk rock zombie movie — they mean it, maaan. If it doesn't scare the stuffing out of you, both viscerally and existentially, I doubt if you're human.

In an opening scene that will bring a lump to the throat of anyone who knows a little of the backstory on PETA, a hideous virus known as "Rage" is loosed upon the world when a bunch of animal-rights activists free some lab chimps. The digital-video cinematography provides a sense of surveillance-camera realism, and the sometimes stroboscopic editing (instead of zooming in to a close-up, for instance, Boyle will opt for a series of literally painful cuts to get there) and the acute sound design discourage you from ever feeling settled. After one particularly angry simian jumps on an especially self-righteous and irritating liberator, the screen goes black, and the title comes up.

As Danny Boyle himself has said, this Garland-conceived ellipsis is an inspired stroke of storytelling economy. We reenter England after the fall, as it were, to see heretofore conked-out young bike messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) wake up stark naked in a hospital bed, IV still hooked up to his arm. We share in his discovery of what happened, and his subsequent struggle for survival. Things go from bad, to better, to bad, to worse, in ways that sometimes have not so much to do with the zombies — who are not undead, per se, but are merely incurably angry. In 28 Days Later, the world doesn't end with a bang or a whimper — it ends with a twisted scream and a geyser of projectile-vomited blood. Prepare to get seriously stressed.