Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed
First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last film was generally (and rightly) regarded as a desultory cash grab, there is much riding on this one. The verdict? It's entertaining but not outstanding. The biggest surprise is its tonal swerve into sentimentality. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, however, bring character and heft and, just to put your minds at rest, yes, it's as magnificently bloodthirsty as ever.
What you will most want to know is: 28 years after the 'rage virus' was let loose from a chimpanzee laboratory, where the hell are we? We're on an island off England's northeast coast where a group of survivors have retreated. The virus, we are told, has been contained in the UK while the rest of the world has abandoned us, which is mean. The film is also a family drama, with, at its centre, a dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a mum (Comer) and their son Spike (Alfie Williams). Spike is now 12 and must embark on a hunting trip to the mainland with his father to learn how to kill 'the infected'. This seemed like madness to me, but there you are.
The 'infected' are not zombies as they've never been dead so can't be undead – I'm a stickler for this sort of thing – but they're certainly zombies to all intents and purposes, with their cravings for human flesh and blood. We have skinny, naked, screeching ones who lurch awkwardly (or sprint fast, best of both worlds) and fat, slow ones who crawl the forest floors like Sumo wrestlers with grievous psoriasis. 'There are some strange people on the mainland,' Spike's father tells him at one point. You don't say?
There's jeopardy, jump scares and gory moments – such as intestines spilling out of mauled bodies – in freeze-frame. From what I could tell – through my fingers – one of 'the infected' gets an arrow straight to the penis, and while I'm not rooting for them, what an unpleasant way to go. I'd heard that 'the infected' had mutated to be more intelligent but I couldn't see too much evidence for that. The tonal switch happens midway through, when it stops being a father-son story and becomes a sentimental mother-son one. Which means they go on a quest together that brings them into the orbit of Fiennes's character. And while I daren't say too much it does look as if he's been Tango'd. The audience tittered when he first appeared but I hope they were appreciative (after Conclave, I can forgive him anything).
Boyles's extensive use of an iPhone gives it the shaky look fans of the original will welcome, while the soundtrack features a brilliantly deployed, century-old recital of Kipling's poem 'Boots'. It could be smarter, with less of a kill-or-be-killed narrative, and I would have liked a crib sheet. Who gets to become a fat Sumo and who doesn't? The second film made a big deal of some people becoming contaminated without symptoms, and that's just gone away?
But Comer and Fiennes bring depth – and you can sense some fun was had. The ending, alas, isn't an ending, but a set-up for the next one. I now realise the sequel was filmed simultaneously and is due for release in January. It's called 28 Years Later: Bone Temple. That's cheating, to my mind, and if it picks up where we leave off, shouldn't it be 28 Minutes Later? Get a grip, lads. Get a grip.
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Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Ian Greaves
In 1974, the 'black magic' of Penda's Fen horrified its audience – but left an extraordinary impression on director Danny Boyle
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
The ‘diabolical' BBC drama that inspired 28 Years Later
Landing in the BBC One schedules one Thursday evening in March 1974, Penda's Fen sat oddly. For those viewers who had earlier watched Tony Blackburn host Top of the Pops, or caught up with Are You Being Served? here was a completely different beast. It was peculiar – even by the standards of the channel's prestigious Play for Today slot, within which it sat. After all, the film set up a battle between the forces of Light and Dark, individualism and conservatism, on the Malvern Hills – all played out through the eyes of a priggish adolescent. Few who saw it would have gone to bed without its succession of extraordinary, terrifying visions haunting their dreams – visions which, if director Danny Boyle is to be believed, 'left an extraordinary impression on me'. At the age of seventeen much of it went over his head but he knew that night it was an 'incredible film' and when he eventually moved into television in the late Eighties, its director Alan Clarke was the first person he contacted. Small wonder, too, that Boyle's latest film, 28 Years Later, a zombie horror set in Northumberland, feels like a direct successor to the eerie rural imagery of Penda's Fen. The film is the story of a vicar's son, Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), a hidebound teenager whose comfortable, complacent assumptions about his world crumble one by one. He is visited by demons and angels, meets the ghost of his idol Edward Elgar, sees a church aisle splitting to reveal a giant bottomless chasm, is spoken to by Jesus on the cross, and witnesses the arrival of the seventh-century King Penda – the last pagan king of Mercia. Like a modern-day Piers Plowman, each visitor tells Franklin a truth that he must assimilate – and which shakes his conservative, little-Englander views. The film's cry of individualism and the radical spirit has reverberated for over 50 years. Long before 'Rooster' Byron, the whirling, maverick force at the heart of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Penda Fen's found uncanny, romantic resistance in the depths of the British countryside. This 'film for television' was created by playwright David Rudkin, who had built his reputation with Afore Night Come for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. This set out his stall as a writer of dark power and originality, depicting fruit-pickers at an orchard descending into savagery after a helicopter sprays them with pesticide. Rudkin himself resisted any connection to the then-burgeoning genre of 'folk horror'. But today it's hard not to view Rudkin's obsession with England's deep past, elemental forces, and his environmental fears as being in the same lineage as The Wicker Man (1973), John Bowen's 1970 film Robin Redbreast (known as 'Britain's Rosemary's Baby') and the occult fiction of Dennis Wheatley. It was the mood of the times. A queasy pastoralism – which looks ever more prescient in our era of climate fears – haunts Penda's Fen. Yet it is more than that: throughout the film, there's a constant sense that some religious, mystical force is about to erupt from the pregnant landscape. The true miracle is that it was ever broadcast at all. By 1971, Rudkin was struggling to get his increasingly difficult work staged; he also felt abandoned by television. That summer, though, producer David Rose came calling. He had enjoyed success with the launch of the police drama Z-Cars in the 1960s and had recently moved to the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. He wanted to put on new stories and Rudkin was high on his list. Penda's Fen was commissioned a year later. Rose, who went on to set up Film on Four, always regarded it as his proudest achievement. 'It's an extraordinary piece of work,' he told me. 'My mother never spoke to me about my programmes, but she was haunted for nights by Penda's Fen.' Spencer Banks – who played the film's adolescent hero – was familiar to many viewers from the hugely successful children's sci-fi series Timeslip. But his step into peak-time 'serious' drama was challenging. When Banks first went up for the part of Stephen, he never saw a script during auditions. He remembers his father sat at the kitchen table, checking over the contract. 'Oh, here's a clause you don't see very often,' he said. 'The actor agrees to be set on fire.' It was daunting for an 18-year-old to communicate this otherworldly journey into adulthood and – as Dennis Potter put it in his review for the New Statesman – 'the images of light and darkness warring in the young man's mind'. In early rehearsals, Banks recalls he was 'confused and a little lost,' but in the end, 'I quite simply put all my faith in the director, Alan Clarke. Which I think is the reason we got the result that we did.' In commissioning the drama, Rose put together a writer and director who were chalk and cheese. Alan Clarke cut his teeth at ITV but was now firmly part of the BBC drama department. Today, his reputation is built on the violent and gritty Scum and Made in Britain – which, in their concern with broken, brutish young men, prefigure shows like Adolescence. But Clarke's early work tended to be naturalistic, contemporary and not as focused on vicious young men. Such a down-to-earth style was at odds with Rudkin's poeticism. At their first meeting, Rudkin was told by the director that this was 'a heavy number. How many books do I have to read to understand this?' 'Just the one,' replied Rudkin, pointing to the script in his hand. In the end, their two visions gelled. The film's fantastic imaginings have their power because they are presented as real, almost ordinary, which makes them all the more disturbing. Achieving this pulsing otherness was the next challenge. The shoot – much of it done outdoors – was an enormous operation, and the weather was a constant challenge. Actor Ian Hogg, who played local firebrand playwright Arne – the man who sparks Stephen's turn towards pastoral deep England – remembers how 'it rained when it shouldn't almost always'. The director began to take it personally. One sodden day, he asked his production manager, 'If I strip to the waist and thrash about in the mud, do you think [God] will forgive me and send some sunshine?' The crew's base camp was Chaceley, a village near Tewkesbury whose population even today is just a little over a hundred. The rectory, which doubled as Stephen's childhood home, was the location for a number of scenes, including the visit of a demon. As Stephen tosses and turns in the throes of an erotic dream about a fellow schoolboy, a terrifying, gargoyle-like incubus kneels on top of Stephen as he sleeps. In another scene straight from William Blake, an angel appears to Stephen on a riverbank. Make-up designer Jan Nethercot recalls having to create a convincing heavenly visitation. Painting the actor gold, there was a worry he would asphyxiate if they failed to leave a small part of the skin uncovered. 'We'd seen Goldfinger,' she recalls. The marshland that day was misty. Jan's assistant, Penny Gough, remembers how the light caused a radiance on the paint: 'The gold from his wingtips went right up into the mist and it was spectacular.' A further unforgettable image is of a man in a dinner jacket and bow-tie, standing by a tree stump on a garden lawn, as he uses a meat cleaver to cut off the hands of children in front of their devout parents. It's a queer, disturbing comment on subjugation – and vividly traumatising. The scene is presented as some ghastly, jubilant ritual, the victims rejoicing in their missing limbs. Filming the scene, Clarke's main worry was whether the BBC would allow a crew to put any child in this situation. Costume designer Joyce Hawkins promptly volunteered her daughter, who is herself now a television producer. 'It's a wonder I wasn't personally traumatised,' says Caroline Hawkins. 'Or maybe I was, who knows?' Almost five million people watched Penda's Fen on its first transmission. Callers to the duty log described it as 'horrific' and 'approaching black magic'. One said it was 'diabolical' and promised they 'will be writing to someone very important', but hadn't decided who it would be. Those making it knew that the film was special – but none would have expected it to become as deeply embedded in the public consciousness. What brought it back from obscurity was a repeat on Channel 4 in 1990, just two days before the director Clarke's death. A new generation taped it and, slowly, Penda's Fen entered the canon, leading to books, music, cinema screenings and even academic conferences. The film also left its mark on English filmmakers like Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) and Ben Wheatley (A Field in England). And, of course, Danny Boyle. At the time, though, the film was too singular to get a common reaction. Like a message in a bottle, it went out into the world and, as with the most lasting works of art, connected to the present moment. It touches on education, defence, the environment, paganism and English traditions – but also has characters who are non-binary. (Indeed, the film's climax sees Stephen proclaim to the Wiltshire downs: 'My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man… I am mud and flame!') Speaking last year, Rudkin recalled a postbag filled with correspondents who said they had 'some inner place it reached that nothing else had.' More than 50 years on, Penda's Fen continues to find viewers' souls – and shake them. Penda's Fen: Scene by Scene by Ian Greaves is published by Ten Acre Films on June 23. Spencer Banks will appear at a screening hosted by the Barbican Centre in London on September 6. The film is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI.
Metro
6 hours ago
- Metro
I watched 28 Years Later despite hating horror films - scaredy-cats should too
I distinctly remember the moment I started hating scary films. My friend's mum had snuck me and her daughter – two only-just-13-year-olds – into a screening of 15-rated Hot Fuzz. I know now that this Simon Pegg cult classic is considered a comedy but for teenage me, it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen. Beheadings, impalings, and charred bodies – it was far too much. So when 28 Weeks Later came out that same year, and friends suggested watching the original in preparation, I squirmed. I actually believe I sat on my pal's sofa with eyes closed, periodically walking in and out the room (which has resulted in a very patchy recollection of the plot). Anyway, all that's to say that I haven't strayed far from the rom-com/action/comedy genre since. Until this week – when I scored an invite to the premiere of 28 Years Later. Not one to turn down a freebie, and with my 31-year-old big girl pants firmly on, I decided to give it a watch. Warning: This article contains spoilers. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video And I have to say, even as someone who despises jumpscares, it's definitely worth seeing. I do have a slight disclaimer in that I did demand Metro's senior film reporter Tori Brazier – who had seen the film the day before – warn me about the scariest moments. I was met with instructions like 'when you see the deer skull, close your eyes', and 'turn away when they enter the train carriage'. For those who have spent a life trying to stay blissfully unaware of the plot of the zombie trilogy, it's this: 28 years before the most recent installment, animal rights activists release chimpanzee lab subjects who essentially spread a rage-inducing virus across the UK creating 'the infected' (aka zombies). These running, blood-vomiting, shrieking monsters (who are largely naked by 28 Years Later) terrorise the UK to the point that the nation is placed in global quarantine, with human survivors left to defend themselves while life goes on in the rest of the world. In a little community, on a small island off the mainland, separated by one road through the water, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), his mum Isla (Jodie Comer) and his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), have found safety. The film sees Spike and both of his parents make trips to the mainland; in his dad's case, it's so Spike can make his first kill; in his mum's, Spike's looking to find the mysterious Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who lives on the mainland and who Spike believes can cure Isla of her unknown illness. And of course, there's the infected to navigate around – especially the new alphas (aka super zombies) providing ample opportunity for blood, gore and scares. There's the opening five minutes, where we wait with bated breath to see if a roomful of terrified children survive the infected descending. Well, you can guess how that goes. And there's the scene where we see an alpha rip a man's head from his neck, withdrawing his spine like a bone from a tender beef rib, and using it to batter another man. But you know what, despite Tori's warnings, I only closed my eyes once (I did, however, jump out of my skin twice). Because, in that moment, I really felt like I would be missing out if I decided to watch the insides of my eyelids instead. The acting in this film is phenomenal. Right before it screened, Danny Boyle talked about the 'Harry Potter effect' and how there are an incredible amount of talented young wannabe-actors out there. We saw it with Owen Cooper in Adolescence, and we see it again with Alfie Williams who does a stand-out job, considering it is his character that leads the entire plot of the film. We feel his terror, fear for his safety from the offset, feel the immense pressure that's on him, see his youthful innocence when he notices his dad is exaggerating their successes, and treasure the moments he has with his mum, pulling silly faces in a crumbling cathedral. The main cast may be small but they are mighty. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes don't have a huge amount of screen time each but when they do appear, they draw you in with their quirks, flaws and humanness (which is kind of the whole point of the film, I know). Yes, I might have found the straddling of the slapstick comedy vs the heart-wrenching vs the horror jarring at times, but I'm well-assured that that is the beauty of Danny Boyle, and in honesty the film would be a lot weaker if even one of these aspects were missing. As part of her warning, Tori mentioned that there was one scary scene I must keep my eyes open for, and I'm glad I listened. Thinking they've escaped an alpha after a night of near-death experiences, Jamie and Spike walk back across the causeway, the stress falling away as they joke around. The peace doesn't last and we see an immense chase scene, with the camera panning in and out to show the splash of the father and son's strides being closely followed by that of their pursuer, all under an inky blue sky peppered with stars and northern lights. More Trending It's utterly gorgeous while also bringing you out in a cold sweat. I'd have been a fool to look away. And so I'm glad I faced my fears and gave into the horror genre. I would hardly say I'm a convert (I'll still be comfort-watching Miss Congeniality for the rest of my days), but maybe I'll go back and give 28 Days and 28 Weeks later a go. Maybe I'll even like them. Maybe I'll finally be able to face Hot Fuzz. Do you have a story you'd like to share? Get in touch by emailing Share your views in the comments below. 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