The upshot is that only Don is left to greet his teenaged daughter Tammy (Imogen Poots) and young son Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), who were safely overseas when the infection broke out, after they arrive in District One, a settlement established by the U.S. Their quiet life of hiding is soon interrupted (a moment incorporating one of several nice visual surprises), leading to a frenzied attack by the rage-crazed, barely human attackers. They also demonstrate a skill for quickly and deftly establishing the characters, beginning with a prologue that finds married couple Don (Robert Carlyle) and Alice (Catherine McCormack) holed up with a handful of other survivors of the “infected” plague in a boarded-shut house in the British countryside. I admired that film’s technique but was left a little cold by it emotionally not so here, as Fresnadillo and fellow writers Enrique López-Lavigne, Jesús Olmo and Rowan Joffe consistently and inextricably tie the horrific developments in to the protagonists’ emotions and actions. This is not the kind of cinematic second helping that hedges its commercial bets by scaling back the confrontational stuff.Ģ8 Weeks Later was directed and co-scripted by Spain’s Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who won significant acclaim for his 2001 debut feature Intacto. In so doing, it manages at numerous points to be every bit as scary and intense as 28 Days Later, while maintaining an even bleaker and more uncompromising outlook. Sequels aren’t supposed to be as good as 28 Weeks Later, which does what more follow-ups should, and so few do: It uses the concepts introduced in its predecessor as the spine for a fresh dramatic story, instead of simply rehashing the elements that made the original work. Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 8, 2007, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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