28 Days Later

2003

Directed by Danny Boyle

Starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns

J-Rock's Review:













(not an actual screenshot)

Original Review
July 17, 2003

Best flick I've seen all year. This ain't no Italian shit-job zombie flick. Rather, 28 Days Later gives you a different take on the whole zombie genre. In this flick, the "infected" aren't just mindless shufflers - they are in a perpetual state of rage, pursuing any survivors with the ferocity and speed of rabid wolves.

Oh yeah, don't confuse this movie with the Sandra Bullock rehab movie 28 Days. If you rent the wrong one, whoo boy, you'll be wishing that you were infected and/or dead.

Without giving away too much, here's a quick recap - skip it if you don't want to hear anything before seeing the movie, which was how I felt. I didn't watch any trailers, commercials, anything, before I hit the theater. Some scientists are testing the effects of rage on monkeys, some monkey-lovers set the infected chimps free, and the monkeys return the favor by infecting the first people they see. The virus spreads through the blood - if someone gets any in them or if an infected bites them, they become infected within 30 seconds - that's how it spreads like wildfire. When we pick up the movie 28 days later (get it?), Jim wakes up in a hospital, completely alone and clueless (just like the guy in Day of the Triffids). The action picks up from there - some more survivors find Jim and fill him in on what happened; Jim and Selena (another survivor) meet up with Frank and his daughter Hannah; they hear a repeating broadcast by an army stockade claiming to have the cure for infection, so they decide to head for the location of the stockade. But first they have to escape from London, which is a perilous task. They eventually do hit the highway and reach their destination, where they find an army troop holed up on an old estate to defend themselves against the infected, complete with a minefield front lawn. Things turn nasty quickly, as the soldiers set their sights and boners on the two women in the group, much to the dismay of Jim, so he has to rescue them - and that's all I'll give you. You HAVE to see this movie! If you only see one Cillian Murphy movie this year - it has to be 28 Days Later!

Boob factor: you see Selena in her bra but that's it, so if you want some boobs in your zombie flick, you'll have to check out Make Them Die Slowly or Zombie Lake. But make sure you see 28 Days Later first.

Addendum
July 28, 2003
So there was this whole buzz going around that the producers of 28 Days Later had shot a few different endings to the movie, and that if you saw it again and stayed through the credits, you'd see another ending, a "what if..." scenario.

Don't waste your money.

If you've already seen the movie, then leave it at that, because the much-touted new ending sucks - it's just a ploy to get you to spend another 9 bucks. I don't care if this is a spoiler - in fact, I hope it is, so you won't get your hopes up and go see the movie again. Basically, Jim dies after they smash through the mansion gates, so he never has a chance to tell Selena and Hannah that he saw a plane fly overhead. Hannah says "What do we do now?" and Selena says "We move," and they walk down a hallway...and that's it!!!!!!!

The press buzz made it sound like "what if the infection did, in fact, spread outside of England" - but it was nothing like that!!! I actually saw a print ad for the new ending saying that it is "so terrifying it will haunt you for days" - in reality, it was so boring I slept for 3 days!

I lost a lot of respect for a pretty cool movie because of their pathetic attempt to rip off the public.

IMDb link: 28 Days Later