28 Weeks Later

28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel to the ground-breaking 28 Days Later, is one heck of an entertaining horror movie. Despite having a new director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (who took over for the original's Danny Boyle) and an all-new cast of characters, it manages to live up to the lofty standards set by the instant classic first film.What you get here is a competently put-together movie that features superb acting, eye-catching visuals, heart-pounding action, and grisly, effective gore, among other noteworthy aspects.

In the acting department, everyone is up to snuff, but it's genre-fave Robert Carlyle who stands out with his gut-wrenchingly believable performance as Don--an absolutely less-than-heroic yet still sympathetic family man who does whatever it takes to survive. Also of interest to cinephiles is the appearance of rising star, Jeremy Renner, who leads the cast as the genuinely heroic American soldier, Sergeant Doyle; Renner, of course, was the lead in the Oscar award-winning film The Hurt Locker, and in a bit of casting that should excite comic book fans, is playing Hawkeye in the upcoming Joss Wheadon directed comic book feature, The Avengers.

One the gore/action front, 28 Weeks Later really delivers. In the film's grandest set piece, the blades of a military helicopter savage a field full of Rage virus maniacs, or as I like to call them, zombies. Yes, this scene does mirror one in another great zombie movie released in theaters just weeks prior, namely, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. However, one would be rash in claiming that either film stole this idea from the other; rather, this is more likely than not an incidence of what is referred to as synchronicity, what Dictionary.com defines as "an apparently meaningful coincidence in time of two or more similar identical events that are causally unrelated." Weird, but not unheard of.

More queasy potential viewers should know and take into consideration that Fresnadillo's film does contain a very violent, very gory eye-gouging scene that pushes the envelope even further than the violent and gory eye-gouging scene in the first film.

All in all, 28 Weeks Later is a simultaneously fun, yet fairly bleak and brutal film that fans of horror, and the zombie sub-genre in particular, would be wise to seek out.

-Michael Alexander