Thursday

Last night Sunshine and I went out to the ten-something show of 28 Weeks Later.* The venue was some multiplex located on Lee's Highway, just west of an impenetrable knot called "Seven Corners". Of course, we entered Seven Corners knowing precisely where we wanted to go, but emerged heading south on Highway 7. Loath to fail again, I attempted to cut from one spoke-like highway to the other, using only pitch-black residential back roads, the same way a spider circumnavigates its web. Sunshine eventually spied the theater through the rear window, but we eventually arrived on time. In 28 Weeks Later, six more months have passed since the deadly outbreak of "rage virus" that threatened Cillian Murphy a couple of years ago. Its been months since the last of the infected succumbed to starvation, and the US military has cordoned-off London's Isle of Dogs to create a safe haven for healthy survivors. There are two distinct types of Zombie movies: voodoo and horde. The first is rarer, and addresses quant social concerns about abduction, somnambulism, and enslavement with trappings of colonial exoticism and class struggle thrown in for good measure. The second type is more popular, weaving satirical cross-caste memento mori together with fears of mutilation, disease, asexual replication, and death. Of this genus, there are two rather indistinct species: undead zombies and bio-zombies (the second being a literal reading of the first). 28 Weeks Later is a example of this last type, a movie that walks a fat line encompassing both its verisimilitude and metaphor while strictly adhering to apparently immutable genre conventions: the predictability of what happens hinges only on the viewer's familiarity with other, similar sequels (there's a new infection in town, but blood-vomiting zombies are still no match for the evil of regular people). [Cavin]