FILM REVIEW - 28 DAYS LATER.
An excellent
British zombie film, with some very interesting plots twists and developments.
When animal rights activists naively liberate a monkey from medical experimentation lab they unleash a terrifying plague. The monkey has been given drugs, which stimulate all of its inner rage to turn it into a blood-crazed zombie within seconds. When it bites one of the animal rights protesters, he I turn attacks the others and the Rage Virus is soon decimating the British population.
28 days after the Rage reduces the population to a fraction of its former numbers, a man wakes p in hospital. He was a courier, knocked down in a car accident and only now awakens from his coma, to find London a ghost town. In scenes clearly reminiscent of John Wyndham’s Day Of The Triffids, he wanders round the
deserted city trying to figure out what happened. He soon witnesses the fast moving Rage
zombies, but he is rescued by a feisty female survivor, and with a few others, they decide to head North, hoping to establish contact with an army division they have heard of as running a safe haven near to Manchester.
They face a terrifying escape from London, where even rats run away from the plague victims, and in dwindling numbers, they head North. The main hero’s hesitation to kill even a zombie endangers everyone at times, and soon they reach Manchester only to see the whole city is on fire. With only the hero and two young women left, they finally find the army, but their troubles are only just starting out.
Commanding officer Christopher Ecclestone is clearly deranged and running his own little empire, having had no orders from London. He has a rage zombie captive, and tortures it – hoping to see its weaknesses and learn ho long it will take it to starve to death. Worse, having had no orders from London. Worse, as his sex-crazed squaddies have had no sex with women for over a month, he plans on using the two girls as a way of breeding his own future population. When the hero learns of this he protests so the army try to kill him, but he now learns how to fight for his own desperate survival, becoming quite naturally savage and enraged to the point where is indistinguishable from the zombies. He even releases the captive zombie to keep the soldiers occupied while he rescues the girls, who are terrified by his rampage and almost mistake him for the zombies too.
With Ecclestone killed, the hero and the girls escape to the Lake District, holding out another 28 days while the zombies do starve out. They learn as a plane flies over that the plague has not affected any country outside of the United Kingdom and that the rest of the World is now coming to the rescue.
There is an alternative ending on the DVD in which the hero is killed off leaving the women to fend for them. A very imaginative film with very haunting scenes of a deserted London, fast moving zombies instead of shambling slow ones who couldn’t catch a tortoise, and Ecclestone in fine barking mad mode as the army C/O. A superb sequel 28 Weeks Later was released in 2007.
Arthur Chappell