Cocktail Please make the

Cocktail

Please make the message constructive, you are fully responsible for the legality of anything you contribute. Terms conditions apply. Not suitable for persons under Disc Type: Single side, dual layer Audio: Dolby Digital 1 English, Dolby Digital 1 Italian Subtitles: English, Italian Extras: Commentary track, deleted scenes, alternate endings, making of featurette, photo galleries, theatrical trailer, teaser trailer, music video, animated storyboards Cast: Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, Christopher Eccleston Genre: Action, Horror and Thriller 31 Days of Horror By Robert Fure on October 13, 2008 Comments 6 Synopsis: Great Britain falls prey a violent plague-virus that turns the citizens into blood thirsty animals with insatiable appetites for violence. The sequel picks up after the American military has intervened to help restore life as normal in London, where things quickly go to hell. Killer Scene: In 28 Days Later, Jim flees from an infected person engulfed in flames. The helicopter scene in 28 Weeks Later, where a dozen zombies are dispatched by the whirring rotor, remains memorable, though perhaps the best is opening where Don abandons his wife and flees a voracious horde, barely escaping with his life. Violence: With vicious knife wounds, flaming infected, bites, tears, beatings, gunshots and all other sorts of ways of inflicting grievous bodily harm against living tissue, the films are good and violent, with gallons of blood spilled. Sex: The movies aren t very sexy, unless you like blood. Which I do. But in the flesh department, you see a nude Cillian Murphy and a few glimpses of exposed flesh here and there. Scares: Plenty of jump scares to make you pop out of your chair, though some are a bit telegraphed. The mood is foreboding but at times fails to be terrifying, though spread through both bits are some inspired bits of tension and a few scenes that will have you biting your nails. Final Thoughts: A lot of people give credit to Danny Boyle for re-inventing the zombie genre and while I don t go that far, I will say the first film was an unexpected bit of good gore and zombie-like mayhem. In the midst of a high-spending spree, I recall renting this film, rather than buying the DVD, to save cash. Immediately after watching the rental, I purchased the film, thereby actually spending more than just buying it outright. Lesson learned! 28 Days Later and its inferior, though still entertaining, sequel are good bets for the Halloween season when you want to make your date jump out of her shoes and into your arms at the sight of a menacing, bloody, infected ghoul with a British accent. What are your thoughts on the 28 Later franchise? Comment Policy: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Film School Rejects reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesnt follow the rules. We also reserve the right to modify any curse words in your comments and make you look like an idiot. Thank You! Reviews of the latest films. By David Edelstein Posted Thursday, June 26, 2003, at 6:30 PM ET If you read Alex Garlands best-selling novel The Beach, youll remember its jarring climax, which seemed like a cross between The Bacchae and Night of the Living Dead 1 The book was set in a utopian collective on an island off the coast of Thailand, but in the face of external threats, internal tensions, and a whopping dose of hallucinogens, the wannabe utopians got carried away by their rage and transformed into something resembling flesh-gouging zombies. I wondered how the 2000 movie, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, would handle that kind over-the-top carnage, but the filmmakers punked out. John Hodge, Boyles screenwriter, came up with something more like a high-school shunning, and the picture ended with a druggy whimper. 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. The title is also an inter-title. 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 cocktail have infected monkeys with a virus of pure rage. The monkeys are watching footage of savage rioting, which Id have predicted would discourage violence: Thats what it does to Alex in A Clockwork Orange 1 If I wanted to drive monkeys into a murderous fury Id 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 its consistent with young Garlands view of the counterculture in The Beach, in which communal idealism leads to fascistic arrogance leads to flesh-gouging zombies. The upshot is a bummer of a scene, man. Its also shocking, disorienting, ferociously intense. The protagonist, Jim Cillian Murphy, is a bicycle messenger who was hit by a car a few months earlier and had the good luck to be in a coma when the rage virus hit the fan. He wakes up to find London eerily quiet and stacked with dead bodies, some of whom open their blood-soaked cocktail and come after him. Hes saved from a marauding zombie priest presumably the one who scrawled on the wall of his church The End is Extremely F-ing Nigh by two other survivors, Mark Noah Huntley and the dishy Selena Naomie Harris, who fill him in on what he slept through. Selena tries to give Jim a 10-cc dose of survivalism, demonstrating how to kill even someone you like if you suspect them of being infected, and reminding him that nice people can slow you down when youre trying to get away from zombies. Jim clings stubbornly to his humanismbut how will he respond with the ghouls nipping at his heels? 28 Days Later is like all three George A. 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 movie is derivative as hell, but its also blazingly well-made, and it moves at a ferocious clip. So do its zombies. Unlike the loping Romero dead, the infected here are a barely glimpsed blurwhich makes them terrifying in a different kind of way. When theyre hacked up or shot, their blood spatters stroboscopically in shiny diamonds. 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 youre a frothing, bloody-eyed zombie, too.