(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER OR NOT ANYONE SURVIVES)
[Now for the movie that started the whole virus infected speed zombie controversy.]
28 Days Later (2002) Directed by Danny Boyle. Staring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston.
In the end Cillian Murphy and his two female companions survive to make contact with the outside world.
Following the animal rights activist release of an alarmingly violent chimpanzee from a medical research facility, cycle courier Murphy comes round from a road traffic accident induced coma to find himself completely alone in an abandoned major London hospital.
Dressing himself in green medical scrubs, Murphy sets off through a deserted city rife with signs of some chaotic catastrophe looking for help and answers.
Unfortunately for Murphy, the first person he encounters is a maniacal, blood splattered priest obviously intent on extracting more than just a confession from him.
Murphy's flight attracts an increasing number of similarly rabid individuals until he is rescued by a young pair who lead him to their refuge in a London Underground station snack kiosk.
Although unaware of the exact source of infection, Naomie Harris and her companion explain the rapid contagion that has spread uncontrollably through the population turning everyone affected into blood-crazed monsters.
The full horror of the situation is revealed to Murphy, first, when the pair help him to reach his parents' home, where he finds that they have committed suicide, and then, when Harris slaughters her companion without hesitation, as soon as she sees that he has accidentally come into contact with one of the infected.
Murphy and Haris's prospects seem bleak until they discover another pair of survivors, Brendan Gleeson and his teenage daughter, who plan to abandon their fortified tower block apartment in order to track down the origin of a prerecorded radio transmission promising a solution to infection.
Travelling north in Gleeson's black taxi cab, the group eventually reach a corpse strewn blockade that turns out to be the source of the broadcast.
When Gleeson is accidentally infected by one of the corpses, the group is only saved by the sudden appearance of a squad of soldiers, who subsequently take Murphy and the women to a nearby mansion that they have made into a base.
There they meet the soldiers' commanding officer, Christopher Eccleston, who explains that the promised solution is to wait for the infected to starve to death, while his men get busy repopulating society with the willing, or otherwise, help of the women that have been lured to their camp.
Realising their mistake, Murphy has to escape the now murderous squaddies and somehow free the trapped women, which he does with the help of an infected soldier who he lets loose in the mansion.
As the crazed soldier works his way through his former comrades, Murphy and the women take flight in Gleeson's cab, but not before Murphy is shot in the chest by a soon to be consumed Eccleston.
Harris is obviously no stranger to the emergency room, though, as she succeeds in saving Murphy's life.
The movie closes with the trio signalling their survival with a huge homemade banner spread out on the ground for a low flying jet fighter that buzzes the isolated cottage that they have made their home to see.
George A. Romero purists may have balked at Boyle's reinvention of the zombie horror movie. But there's no denying that his creation sustained a genre that became hard to take seriously after its superb spoofing by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) which actually made an oblique reference to Boyle's contested premise that zombies could result from a virus infection and would die unless sustained by consuming others.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_of_the_Dead
Thursday 1 April 2010
28 Weeks Later (2007)
(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER OR NOT ANYONE WILL EVER SURVIVE)
[Now the first of a two part Bust covering a movie and its sequel, that unusually was more than just a money making exercise.]
28 Weeks Later (2007)
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. With Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Renner, Mackintosh Muggleton.
In the end a "rage" infected Robert Carlyle is shot to death by his teenage daughter as she witnesses his attack on her younger brother, Mackintosh Muggleton.
Carlyle only barely manages to survive an outbreak of a highly contagious virus that causes its victims to become crazed flesh eating monsters, by leaving his wife for dead in an isolated house overrun by the infected.
Haunted by his cowardly flight, he eventually reaches the safety of London's Isle of Dogs, which has been transformed into a military controlled disinfected area from which it is hoped to rebuild British society.
While there, Carlyle is re-united with his two teenage children who by chance had been abroad on a school trip during the initial catastrophic outbreak.
However, it's not long before Carlyle discovers that the pair have sneaked out of the protected zone to visit their old family home, where to everyones' amazement the children find their mother alive despite Carlyle having told them that she was dead.
Once recovered by a military infection control team both children and mother are quarantined separately within the military controlled area while their possible exposure to the virus is assessed.
The discovery that the mother has miraculously survived obvious contact with the virus and so become its first known unaffected carrier, is made just too late to save Carlyle, though, who manages to infect himself by secretly penetrating his wife's quarantine and kissing her.
Things rapidly spiral out of control, as the infected Carlyle goes through the population of the controlled zone in a chain reaction of infection. So much so, that the military decide that the only way to deal with the situation is to annihilate everyone within the area whether or not they are infected.
Luckily for the children, the possibility that their genetic makeup might hold a clue to fighting the virus is recognised by one of the military medics, who together with a rooftop sniper, Jeremy Renner, disillusioned by his superiors' kill-all order, helps the children and several other survivors to escape immediate death within the zone.
However, it is not just the children and their protectors who manage to escape into the surrounding city. So they end up having to evade not only the chasing infection control teams but also a brand new wave of flesh hungry maniacs.
Eventually the children manage to rendezvous with a helicopter pilot friend of Renner's, but not until everyone else of their companions has been killed, Carlyle eventually having been dispatched by his daughter.
The pilot agrees to airlift the pair to the safety of nearby France, but whether or not Muggleton inherited his mother's immunity to the virus is thrown into questions by the closing movie's shots of virus infected lunatics storming towards the iconic Eiffel Tower.
The sequel is a worthy successor to Executive Producer Danny Boyle's low-budget zombie hit 28 Days Later (2002) the emphasis having shifted from whether anyone can survive to whether the spread of infection can ever be contained. And, of course, the way has been paved for a further sequel, 28 Months Later.
Flesh crazed zombies have never been so animated;)
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later
[Now the first of a two part Bust covering a movie and its sequel, that unusually was more than just a money making exercise.]
28 Weeks Later (2007)
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. With Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Renner, Mackintosh Muggleton.
In the end a "rage" infected Robert Carlyle is shot to death by his teenage daughter as she witnesses his attack on her younger brother, Mackintosh Muggleton.
Carlyle only barely manages to survive an outbreak of a highly contagious virus that causes its victims to become crazed flesh eating monsters, by leaving his wife for dead in an isolated house overrun by the infected.
Haunted by his cowardly flight, he eventually reaches the safety of London's Isle of Dogs, which has been transformed into a military controlled disinfected area from which it is hoped to rebuild British society.
While there, Carlyle is re-united with his two teenage children who by chance had been abroad on a school trip during the initial catastrophic outbreak.
However, it's not long before Carlyle discovers that the pair have sneaked out of the protected zone to visit their old family home, where to everyones' amazement the children find their mother alive despite Carlyle having told them that she was dead.
Once recovered by a military infection control team both children and mother are quarantined separately within the military controlled area while their possible exposure to the virus is assessed.
The discovery that the mother has miraculously survived obvious contact with the virus and so become its first known unaffected carrier, is made just too late to save Carlyle, though, who manages to infect himself by secretly penetrating his wife's quarantine and kissing her.
Things rapidly spiral out of control, as the infected Carlyle goes through the population of the controlled zone in a chain reaction of infection. So much so, that the military decide that the only way to deal with the situation is to annihilate everyone within the area whether or not they are infected.
Luckily for the children, the possibility that their genetic makeup might hold a clue to fighting the virus is recognised by one of the military medics, who together with a rooftop sniper, Jeremy Renner, disillusioned by his superiors' kill-all order, helps the children and several other survivors to escape immediate death within the zone.
However, it is not just the children and their protectors who manage to escape into the surrounding city. So they end up having to evade not only the chasing infection control teams but also a brand new wave of flesh hungry maniacs.
Eventually the children manage to rendezvous with a helicopter pilot friend of Renner's, but not until everyone else of their companions has been killed, Carlyle eventually having been dispatched by his daughter.
The pilot agrees to airlift the pair to the safety of nearby France, but whether or not Muggleton inherited his mother's immunity to the virus is thrown into questions by the closing movie's shots of virus infected lunatics storming towards the iconic Eiffel Tower.
The sequel is a worthy successor to Executive Producer Danny Boyle's low-budget zombie hit 28 Days Later (2002) the emphasis having shifted from whether anyone can survive to whether the spread of infection can ever be contained. And, of course, the way has been paved for a further sequel, 28 Months Later.
Flesh crazed zombies have never been so animated;)
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later
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