28 Days Later: Critic Reviews

A swankily austere piece of jeepers-creepers sci-fi.

As a parable of human nature under extreme duress, 28 Days Later is never less than interesting.

It flags during the encampment scenes, with some redundant gore, but this is a muscular, virile piece of film-making from Boyle.

An edge-of-your-seat scary movie that startles and chills.

Detestable, not just because its action is so vile or its technique so crude, but because its moral imagination is so impoverished.

A movie that's creepy and truly suspenseful in some places, unintentionally comic or plain awful in others.

Terrifying on the basic heebie-jeebie level, respectful toward its B-movie forebears, and all the more unnerving for coming out in this fretful era of SARS and germ warfare.

Because it's cut-rate, star-free ... outlandishly edge-conscious, and 100 percent British, the movie has a frontier charge built in.

The movie's great fun, but don't get any on you.

It's a zombie movie to make you forget how boring and simple-minded monster movies have become or, better yet, to make you remember how good monster movies can be.

For the most part, 28 Days Later is a smart, vivid nightmare with refreshingly unconventional heroes.

This starkly beautiful, harrowing journey into the worst that can happen opens with video feed images of our unnatural disasters.

It makes for a more intimate brand of horror, one we can't explain away by pretending we're watching the same old well-oiled Hollywood malarkey.

A tough, smart, ingenious movie that leads its characters into situations where everything depends on their (and our) understanding of human nature.

Despite this unusual setting (contemporary Britain in anarchy) and some good scenes, Boyle's new movie is mostly a zombie fiasco, closer to the vacuities of The Beach than the scintillating social satire of Trainspotting.

Deftly directed by Danny Boyle and scripted by novelist Alex Garland, 28 Days Later is seat-squirming, hands-over-the-eyes stuff.

A taut, terrifying thriller that will turn you asthmatic with dread.

The rare horror film that splatters and pauses to consider the splatter, that follows a traditional storyline and then improves upon it, and that avoids cliches while playing one out.

Has enough chills and thrills -- as well as plenty of nearly dead creatures -- to rank among the scariest and most ingenious horror movies in recent memory.

In the old days, a feverish programmer like 28 Days Later would end up on the bottom half of a double bill.

A faux-low-budget zombie pic by director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland that shows a rather arrogant disdain for its audience in between occasional flashes of flair.

An unsettling and thought-provoking vision of a post-apocalyptic future.

Derivative but horrifically effective.

Director Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have rebounded smartly from the bloated Leonardo DiCaprio debacle that was The Beach, their previous collaboration.

[Boyle's] back on British turf here and in fine dark form.