Search - 28 Days Later (Full Screen Edition) on DVD

Simon D. (SeeKingChrist) from LEXINGTON, NC
Reviewed on 10/14/2009...

By far one of my favorite horror films.Some people say this is a zombie film but in reality it's not.It's a film about a small group of survivors in London when the rage virus infects 99% of inhabitants.That being said it is a "virus" film but nothing like you'd expect.The infected are lightning fast and are smart enough to know they have strength in numbers.If you've never seen this I highly recommend giving it a try.

4 of 4 member(s) found this review helpful.

Sarah F. (keanupattinson) from INDIANAPOLIS, IN
Reviewed on 7/30/2009...

Normally I don't care for zombie type movies but this one was just too good to pass up, I picked it up at my local video store and just loved it. It's really very good.

2 of 2 member(s) found this review helpful.

Not just another horror flick

Esther Park | 10/20/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have begun to think that zombie movies are fundamentally about social alienation: the paranoid fantasy that anyone, even the people you love, can suddenly become an inhuman monster and turn against you. This is definitely true of this movie, for me: I feel most scared by it when I am feeling most alienated and downtrodden by society.



In any case, this was the scariest movie I have ever seen. Not just make you jump scary but get under your skin and give you nightmares scary. After seeing it, I had to sleep with my lights on and doors open for two months. But also it really made me think about things like: what is civilization? At one point they have a captive infected and the army guy is studying him. The hero asks him what he has learned and he answers, "I have learned that he will never bake bread." Okay, laugh at me if you want, but I like to bake bread, the old-fashioned way, starting with yeast and doing it all by hand. But I never really thought about all the factors that baking bread depends on: the domestication of wheat, a process that took thousands of years; sufficient social organization to harvest, process and distribute it; my knowledge of the exact formula necessary to get the bread to work right; the gas company delivering gas to my apartment so I can bake it... and so on. What a long and fragile chain of things that could be broken at any link. That's civilization, something we all take for granted.



Another thing I really liked about this movie (although I will never see it again because it scared the heck out of me and anyway I can practically replay the whole thing in my memory) is the way certain otherwise ordinary moments are made transcendant--a bridge or an airplane brings almost you to a state of grace.



Finally, the army guys show that the potential for infection is not just from blood; it's in our blood. It doesn't take a lab experiment gone out of control. It could happen any time and does. That's what war is."

Anger Management

Dark Mechanicus JSG | Fortified Bunker, USSA | 11/11/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Our world has gone completely Mad.



Have you ever thought that very thing---thought it as you watch the news, as you surf the Net, as you read your morning paper? As you watch flickering news reports of the latest mass riot in Liverpool or Paris, ethnic cleaning in the Balkans, slave-trading in the Sudan, tribal genocide all across Africa, our own politicians slobbering at the mouth as they call their opponents liars, morons, traitors?



As you see the latest news flash: shaven-skulled "militia" in dusty fatigues in some dirty border town, shoving weary refugees this way and that with the muzzles of their AK-47s. Or a breathless anchor bringing you up to speed on the fact two levees have given way, erasing---totally obliterating---a city you thought was there for the Ages?



Great. Now imagine that that kind of Insanity amped up a billion times, only it's catching through the blood. Imagine that and you have the travelogue to Hell that is Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later." And in Danny Boyle's film, Hell is very much other people.



Centuries ago the brilliant English physicist and celebrated polymath Sir Isaac Newton contended that "I see so far because I stand on the shoulders of giants." The same thing might be said of director Danny Boyle, who draws heavily on his own giants---zombie Grandmasters like George Romero, Dan O'Bannon, and Stephen King---for his own hyperkinetic descent into a post-Apocalyptic English Hell, "28 Days Later".



But with that in mind, Boyle has distilled all of the shock and terror of Romero's zombie trilogy into two hours of pure adrenaline, two hours of raw, sheer, shrieking terror. He has, with "28 Days Later", out-Romero'd Romero, and his stark, horrific, harrowing portrait of a London gone literally mad manages to capture the end of the world in a manner that utterly eluded the the TV-adaptation of King's "The Stand".



Forget the fact that the red-eyed, shrieking legions of the Infected in this movie aren't classic zombies: sure, they don't feed on the flesh of their victims, and yes, they don't lumber and shamble along.



The Infected don't just get Mad. They get Even.



Nothing in this movie lumbers or shambles along---but make no mistake about it, Boyle's latest is a zombie film, and it is so good, and so scary, that it rightfully claims its Crown as King of the Zombie Movies.



Here are some tasty little nuggets about the movie to tempt you with, without spoilers to ruin your appetite:



The PLOT: Animal rights activists break into a Cambridge biowarfare research facility, intent on setting their primate buddies free. A goggle-eyed scientist, returning a bit late with his moca frappucino, witnessing the break-in, begs them not to free the chimpanzees: the beasts are infected with a highly contagious virus known as Rage, which is spread through the blood and within 20 seconds turns its victim into a froth-mouthed, shrieking homicidal maniac.



The activists ignore the warning, a young woman opens a chimp's cage, and within seconds the chimp launches itself into its erstwhile rescuer's face.



Our protagonist, a bike messenger played sympathetically by Cillian Murphy, awakens from a coma in an eerily empty hospital ward; he stumbles out of the hospital into an equally empty London, and the fun begins.



The CINEMATOGRAPHY: Director of Photography Anthony Dod Mantle is an adherent of Dogme, the cinematic movement committed to using natural lighting; the result sets up the movie's haunting, sere, and unsettling visuals. London broils under a jaundiced, sterile sky, and broods at twilight in an otherwordly greyish blue; the empty city resembles an alien moonscape, and a gas station explosion is shot as though on another planet.



The Infected here don't walk, lumber, or lurch: they run---fast.



London's zombies are glimpsed only as a shrieking blur, or caught as loping shadows against a tunnel-wall; the combination of hyperkinetic editing and the blood-spattering gore (captured using much the same technique employed in the battle sequences of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Gladiator") makes the lulls between encounters with the Infected unbearably suspenseful.



The ACTING: Everyone here is an unknown (with the exception of "Gangs of New York"'s stolid Brendan Gleeson, who plays a London taxicab driver and---for a few minutes, anyway---gives the movie a reassuring moral center), and the acting is all superb and believable.



Cillian Murphy manages a remarkable transformation during the film, remarkable both for its outlandishness and (given the horror of his character's plight) believability. Noamie Harris and Noah Huntley shine as London survivors, and Christopher Eccleston is superbly Kurtzian as an embattled British Army Major at the center of his own raging heart of darkness.



MORAL of the STORY? Two, really: 1) if you're an animal activist, pick targets other than biowarfare facilities; and 2) if you're a soldier holed up in an English manor home, don't keep an infected zombie chained by the leg in the house garden.



Many of "28 Days"'s critics have attacked the movie for being 'derivative'---and yes, Boyle borrows heavily from a treasure-house of zombie and horror movies. The movie practically condenses all of the major action from Romero's 'Dead' trilogy, and the climactic, operatic final sequences in a storm-tossed English manor house could have been lifted directly from the horror video game "Resident Evil. But Boyle takes his inspiration, consolidates it, and then sets out in new, unexpected, and terrifying directions.



Boyle has crafted a masterpiece of movie terror, and one of the most bleakly disturbing films about the end of the world ever made.



And keep your lights out---they're drawn to lights.



JSG"