Jim wanders around the city, plastic bag of Pepsi cans in hand, before he meets some non- shambling, angry-as-hell Rage-infected pseudo-zombies. Twenty-eight days later, Jim ( Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma he finds himself naked in a totally deserted hospital (which sits in the middle of an eerily abandoned London) with a scarred-over head wound, an impressive growth of facial hair, and no idea of what's happened in the past month. While scientists had designed the "Rage" virus as a way of neutralizing violent impulses, it ended up having the opposite effect: once freed, the chimp starts to excarnify its would-be rescuers. The most heartrending moments in the movie come when people we care about get sprayed with the blood of the infected: We see the look of anguish in their eyes before the rage arrives and turns them inside out.In this 2002 post-apocalyptic horror film directed by Danny Boyle and written by novelist-turned screenwriter Alex Garland, a literal hate plague begins taking over Great Britain after animal rights activists set loose an infected chimp in a lab at Cambridge University. In one scene, a tide of rats rushes toward the main characters: They’re not bringing infection, they’re running away from it. And that blood is lethal: If it gets into your eye or mouth or a cut on your hand, then in 10 to 20 seconds you’re a frothing, bloody-eyed zombie, too. When they’re hacked up or shot, their blood spatters stroboscopically in shiny diamonds. Unlike the loping Romero dead, the infected here are a barely glimpsed blur-which makes them terrifying in a different kind of way. The movie is derivative as hell, but it’s also blazingly well-made, and it moves at a ferocious clip. Romero Dead movies packed into one: Its larky shopping scene recalls Dawn of the Dead (1978), and it ends in a military compound, where much of the messed-up Day of the Dead (1985) is set. The upshot is a bummer of a scene, man.Ģ8 Days Later is like all three George A. If I wanted to drive monkeys into a murderous fury I’d show them tapes of, say, Nancy Grace.) Blaming animal-rights activists instead of overweening scientists for summoning up the mother of all plagues strikes me as rather unfair, but it’s consistent with young Garland’s view of the counterculture in The Beach, in which communal idealism leads to fascistic arrogance leads to … flesh-gouging zombies. Most of the film takes place four weeks after the prologue, in which a bunch of militaristic animal-rights activists break into a lab where scientists have infected monkeys with a virus of “pure rage.” (The monkeys are watching footage of savage rioting, which I’d have predicted would discourage violence: That’s what it does to Alex in A Clockwork Orange. My guess is that Garland was bitterly disappointed by the new ending, because he turned around and wrote Danny Boyle a full-length flesh-gouging zombie movie called 28 Days Later (Fox Searchlight).
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