28 Days Later Six Years Later

If it weren't for the fact that I was watching this movie on the spare monitor while I fought half-orcs and farmed scholar crafting materials, I'd want the past two hours of my life back.

How the heck did this movie get great reviews again? My guess is that a) a lot of those who loved the movie don't play enough video games, b) it was capitalizing off fear from the SARS period and c) it's chic to love grainy, artsy-fartsy "foreign" (okay, British) films.

I don't have a problem with British style production, mind you. I was getting through The Prisoner okay. I had a great time with a Fish Called Wanda. (John Cleese is super.) Anything Monty Python is fabulous. Hell, I was getting through Youtube video's of the cheesy Sandman TV episodes.

The only horror induced by this movie is the thought that some people managed to enjoy it, shoddy plot and all.

Spoilers (not that you'll really miss anything by not watching it) ensue:

1) Prologue: Grainy artsy fartsy film shot of chimpanzees in cages in an "ooh, evil Cambridge science lab." Heroic activists crash the lab in ski masks! They're gonna free the chimpanzees cos of the Euro sentiment of "ooh, poor animals!" A scientist in white lab coat tells them, nooooo, the chimps are INFECTED! They don't listen. Freed chimps promptly jumps out and bites 'em.

... Hrm. I swear I saw this coming. Honest. Dumb farts. Nevermind, I'll excuse it. You gotta setup for a zombie flick SOMEHOW, right?

Nevermind that movies like Outbreak, 12 Monkeys and god knows what other flicks love this West Nile virus scare/TV trope blown up to extremes. I'll forgive ya, it's only the first five minutes.

2) Completely unrelated male who turns out the protagonist of our story (with a truly ugly face that says the producers filmed this on a budget and probably with some friends doing them acting favors) wakes up in a hospital. Everything is quiet. There is a chaos of items strewn around, but oh noes...no one is there! "Hello, hello?" he calls.

... I'm getting flashbacks of every vaguely zombie/post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen. Granted, a number of them like all the Resident Evil sequels, I Am Legend and Serenity have not yet been filmed. But the main mood is mostly very 12 Monkeys (and a quick IMDB check shows it was filmed in 1995, definitely before 2003.)

And there's also JMS' TV series Jeremiah, which also played from 2002-2004, with a similar post-apoc feel, with more biblical overtones.

3) Eventually he comes to the realization that the world as he knew it is gone, it's filled with horrible infected zombies and he meets two comrades who rescue him from the prior lot.

... I'm thinking, aha, spare characters. I bet they will get killed at some point. Ten minutes later, I'm proven right. The extra male dies horribly, leaving the female conveniently available for male protagonist as future love interest.

*sigh*

4) They travel, flashing product placements (Pepsi vending machine! Eat Maltesers to keep your sugar levels up for zombie fighting! Choose your soda, Pepsi or Tango!) along the way, to meet two more spare characters - a father and a daughter. Awww, what a sappy relationship, how lucky of them to still be alive, yay, they all have a picnic, "just like family."

... I'm thinking, yeah, sure y'right. This is a depressing dystopian world filled with zombies, bet one of them bites it, leaving the happy relationship shattered awfully. Sure enough, patience is rewarded.

5) But I get ahead of myself. Because these are poor poor civilians of a British country, they have no access or any clue how to use guns (unlike American flicks where you can just bust open a gunstore and shooteth Aliens,) so they get to hold one knife (kitchens have more than one knife, don't they?), a baseball bat and use a small car to flee in terror.

Despite this stress on 'realism,' they also manage to plow their getaway car through a mountain of other dead rusty auto heaps without any whiplash, or serious driver injury besides some cracks in the windshield. Hello? Inertia? Where are you?

... I'm thinking that Left 4 Dead might be more fun. At least I get to interact and SHOOT waves of zombies. Perhaps fast-moving zombies were a revelation in 2003. Six years on, no civilized infected walks around with arms raised like a cartoony Frankenstein's monster anyway.

6) So anyway, past one redeeming shot of a flat's roof filled to the brim with every manner of container in the hope to collect rainwater, they are trying to get to the mysterious site of a radio message. We are soldiers! We have guns and can protect you! We have the answer to the infection! You have to come to us at this address!

... Har. Right. Let's see, if you really are organized enough to save people suffering from the effects of an apocalypse, why are you playing a radio message on loop?

Surely every post-apoc film we've seen by now from Mad Max, the Postman, unsoweiter tells us that a group/tribe with guns can be a very bad thing, especially to weaker counterparts that cannot put up a fight and have desirable things? Like food looted from a supermarket, and two women?

It's a trap, dumb farts! It's a trap! Fly, you fools!

7) Nope, they go anyway. Gotta cling onto hope, y'know. The father conveniently gets himself infected and gets killed by said soldiers, who then hold the one male protagonist and two females at gunpoint and bring them to their base camp.

... Methinks, oh, you guys are SO screwed. And probably for the two females, literally.

(Only logical, right? Post-apoc setting. All rules of human decency tend to go out the window in at least 50% of the population - survival of the fittest and all that. Not to mention, if nearly everyone is dead, you gotta have female breeders to have hope/a future, right? Sure, it's preferable if they found a boyfriend, paired up and contributed to the community, but desperate men do desperate things in order to answer the procreation urge and/or repopulate Earth - it's post-apoc, remember?!)

My only suspense at this point is: "I wonder how much of the attempted brutal RapeAsDrama will they dare to show?"

Alas, they mostly wussed out.

8) Some interminable amount of time was wasted on pleasantries with the soldier's leader - a major who likes to dress up as smartly as Hitler when having dinner, just in case you couldn't figure out that there could be something possibly wrong / egomaniacal about people who can gather a tribe to themselves in a post-apoc setting.

He's white too. And keeps a black zombie infected chained up in his yard in order to see how long it takes the infected to starve to death. (Just in case you need symbolism to beat you over the head with a shovel...)

Finally, the cracks in this potential paradise of relief show. A couple of soldiers start getting leery, and touchy-feely. The major can't really control them that well, and whispers "go slow" as an order. He tries to recruit male protagonist by sharing the logical post-apoc philosophy (see above) and male protagonist reacts in OMGZORs "We have to get out of here! NOW!" horror.

9) He's also in a house full of nine soldiers with guns as he tries to warn the two unwary females (personally, if there was an apocalypse, I'd be resigned to being a baby machine or kill myself before the logical thing happens, how do you not realize that nine testosterone-filled men have urges? And they have guns!)

Sure enough, male protagonist gets the shit kicked out of him. The two females get taken off to be raped.

In order not to have the story end on a pessimistic note though, they do not shoot the male protagonist right there and then, surrounded by nine hostile men with guns. They somehow find it necessary to take him to a mass grave site with only two people accompanying him.

... I've quite lost the thread of the plot by this time. Clicking on my 37th Ancient Vase and fighting off lots of -1 con half-orc aggro was more exciting.

When I next look up, apparently the soldiers were stupid enough to take male protagonist AND a soldier who was on the moral side of right to be shot, with only two people accompanying them. There is some kind of panicked disagreement, some squabbling over "you won't really shoot me, will you?", some potential threat of infected by the mass grave site, a couple of gunshots that kill two soldiers, and suddenly near naked male protagonist is running for his life (wrists tied in front of him - there is a reason why real police have stopped handcuffing criminals in front, y'know) with one last soldier chasing after him, puffing and panting, instead of shooting him.

Somehow, naked male protagonist manages to jump a fence (power of adrenaline, I guess) and escape.

Crud, we lost him, the incompetent stormtroopers report to their major. And of course, they split themselves up yet again to go chase him down.

10) Meanwhile, all this ruckus is making the two soldiers guarding the two females quite unable to perform. (I mean, we can't ever be so tasteless as to actually rape them, imagine what that would do to the ratings and the movie reviews!) The horror apparently is in the anticipation.

So instead they waste more time by making them put on red dresses at gunpoint, there is much screaming and shouting and reluctant female-ing, some slaps, a oh-so-heroic kiss/embrace by the older female to distract the horrible pigs from the teenage female, glum resignation of their terrible eventual fate, yadda yadda.

11) Somewhere and somewhen in all of this mess of a plot, the naked male protagonist turns up, armed with a soldier's rifle. He also looks up at the sky to see the DeuxExMachina trail of an airplane that means that they are not alone, yay! He doesn't shoot the remaining soldiers. No, that would be too crass. No poetic justice, y'know?

So he shoots off the chain of the black zombie, who promptly proceeds to tear up the soldiers, who have conveniently wet themselves in terror. (Previously before this, they fought off about fifteen infected storming their house, with landmines, floodlights, the works.)

Somehow, the two females don't get a single infected scratch in all this horrible slobbering chaos. Must be karma.

Not much else to say. Near naked male protagonist shows up, to get kissed by the older female (who has conveniently fallen in love with the chivalric hero - I suppose we shall get babies after all, in the end!), gets bonked on the head by teenage female for a brief comic laugh ("I thought he was infected and biting you!").

All the evil schwinehunds of soldiers get their comeuppance at the hands of the infected. The major villain (haha, pun) gets to shoot male protagonist in a "surprise, you forgot me" twist, before he gets dragged off by black zombie to meet a horrible end.

The heroic trio (damn, that male protagonist is going to get two grateful gals to surround him in post-movie heroic paradise, huh?) makes their escape in another getaway car.

"Oh, no, the gate, it's locked!"

They decide to go for it and crash right through, arms raised in horror! Screen turns to black.

... I'm wishing they would just die, because this is sickening.

No such luck. The screen fades up from black. The male protagonist wakes up again in a hospital, having been well tended by the two grateful females. Apparently the shot was just a flesh (stomach) wound. Don't ask me how they sewed up his guts, the movie didn't show it, just a bandage.

They are in some kind of country hospital, just the three of them, and they happily sew some kind of massive cloth beacon, to lay out to signal the DeusExMachina (remember the plane?) that hey, there's someone still alive down here, send a helicopter for us!

Movie mercifully ends on this cheery saccharine note.

... Excuse me while I puke my guts out.

I don't get it. How can someone love this drivel? I need someone to explain in slow simple words what's so redeeming about this movie, because I can think of a lot more dark, dystopian flicks that are a lot artier and stronger in plot, plus a lot more Hollywood zombie shooting/explosion sequences that are more gratuitious fun and gore.

I now have a strong need to replay Fallout 3 for a more dreary mood atmosphere, and Left 4 Dead for mood and zombie shootin'. Imagine that. Video games that are better than movies.