P229 9mm Romero Dead movies packed into one: Its larky

P229 9mm 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. In one scene, a tide of rats rushes toward the main characters: Theyre not bringing infection, theyre running away from it. 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. Boyles work here surprised me. Its less heartlessly show-offy than in Trainspotting 1996 and less dopily picture-postcard than in The Beach. The music by John Murphy is an eerie drone that kicks into acid rock when the zombies show up. And it looks like nothing youve ever seen. The movie was shot on video by Anthony Dod Mantle, who often works in the low-tech Danish film collective Dogma. He gives it a documentarylike fluidity but with the punchiness of a horror flick. The light from those low, overcast English skies is yellow-gray and weirdly diffused: You believe Londons lone surviving cab driver, Frank the endearingly blustery Brendan Gleeson, when he surveys the empty pots he has set out on the roof of his skyscraper and curses the sudden drought. Its a mad world, indeed, when the rain stops falling in England. It would be wrong to reveal the thrust of the final act, set in a military compound presided over by Maj. Henry West Christopher Eccleston. But I dont want to leave p229 9mm with the impression that 28 Days Later is only about shooting and stabbing ghouls: It has a loftier theme. The true horror, it turns out, isnt the ragingly infected, but the coldly self-protectivethe people who put their own welfare over the rights of others. The climax is what the end of the movie of The Beach should have been: funhouse-druggy, Grand Guignol, morally dizzying. Like the Romero Dead movies, this is finally the zombie flick as cautionary political tale, and as humanist parable. Its not p229 9mm flesh-gouging zombie we have to worry about, the filmmakers suggest, but the soul-gouging zombie within. Still from 28 Days Later by Peter Mountain/TM and 2003 Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved.