28 Days Later

DIRECTED BY Danny Boyle
STARRING Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment


One of the more entertainingly useless books to have recently landed on Blender’s desk is Max (son of Mel) Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide — a tome that boasts more than 200 pages on how to combat an utterly nonexistent threat.

Whether Brooks intends to follow this up with equally redundant publications (The Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Operator’s Manual, perhaps) is unclear. Tragically, though, the author’s depiction of the undead as physically awkward creatures (“Zombies have little hand-eye coordination”) has already been rendered obsolete by director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.

Last summer’s surprise sleeper hit, the star-free horror movie, set in England, follows a bike courier (Cillian Murphy) as he awakes from a coma to discover the country overrun by flesh-eating ghouls. Unfortunately for him, these are not the lumbering monsters of countless zombie movies, but near–Olympic standard athletes capable of killing anyone in a footrace — were they not too busy literally killing them. Our hero’s situation is made worse by the fact that he has both no idea what’s going on and an almost pathological urge to wander around darkened buildings.

Teaming up with hardened zombie-slayer Naomie Harris and a couple other survivors, Murphy heads to the countryside for the apparent safety of a military outpost. But it’s the first third of this film, shot on digital video, that will haunt your dreams for weeks, as Boyle brilliantly shows an abandoned, post-apocalyptic London — which, although filmed before 9/11, can’t help but bring that day to mind.

Moreover, moviegoers who are disappointed by 28 Days Later’s oddly upbeat finish should be more than satisfied by the trio of alternate endings this DVD offers — none of which, suffice it to say, finds Murphy persuading his brain-munching foes to settle their differences with a nice game of cricket.