When Zombies Attack
PODHORETZ, JOHN
When Zombies Attack Sometimes a horror film is just a horror film. by John Podhqretz Horror is the lowest and most primal form of cinematic entertainment—except,per-haps, for porn. You can take a...
...It's not enough to say that 28 Weeks Later announces the arrival of yet another brilliant Spanish-language filmmaker (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) who shows signs of ruthless mastery to match Pedro Almodovar, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Alfonso Cuaron...
...Fresnadillo and his team of screenwriters certainly had Iraq in mind when they wrote the film: The secure area controlled by the Americans is called "the Green Zone," for example...
...The last half of the movie portrays a desperate effort on the part of a heroic American sniper and an American military doctor to save the lives of two teenagers whose blood might contain an antibody that would save the world from the virus that has depopulated Britain...
...It's not intended to be a political platform...
...This is why you don't want to take your political wisdom from movies like 28 Weeks Later...
...You can take a horror movie, any horror movie, and boil it down to one word: Boo...
...An entire industry of pseudo-academic criticism has arisen, it seems, for the sole purpose of giving its authors intellectual cover for the exhilaration they experience when a movie succeeds in scaring the stuffing out of them...
...A helicopter pilot airlifts the kids across the Channel to Paris...
...It's hard not to think of Iraq and the fear of Islam generated in the Dubya era as the U.S...
...They deserve the Andrew Sullivan Gold Star, as presented by Rep...
...The final image is zombies running demonlike toward the Eiffel Tower—and then, presumably, across Europe, Asia, and Africa...
...These days, it's just not enough to say that the new zombie sequel 28 Weeks John Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...But—and you should stop reading now if you don't want to know the end-ing—by doing everything they can to keep those kids alive, these well-meaning Americans ensure that the rest of the world will soon be destroyed by the zombie virus that has been successfully contained in Britain...
...Perhaps that's why horror moviemakers and their fans tend toward extreme pretension when it comes to describing the work they make and love...
...Touches like this caused A.O...
...Ron Paul...
...When George Romero had the clever idea of staging a sequel to his zombie movie Night of the Living Dead inside a shopping mall—in part because a mall in his native Pittsburgh was willing to offer him a good rate on midnight filming—ecstatic critics dubbed Dawn of the Dead a profound critique of American consumerism...
...to end all Boos...
...After all, you're talking about people who think they understand what Victorian mores were because they've seen Dracula, Prince of Darkness...
...And David Edelstein of New York could only cry out, as to the heavens: "What has our government wrought...
...And so it goes...
...The reason the movie ends the way it does is that it's the most effective and frightening possible conclusion...
...No, it's not enough to praise 28 Weeks Later for these qualities when it can be praised for qualities it does not possess...
...The movie has critics straining mightily to analogize its goings-on to the war in Iraq—because it's in part about how the U.S...
...British vampire movies with heaving-bosom heroines hypnotized into having orgasm-like responses when Dracula bites them on the neck are praised for their deep commentary on Victorian morals...
...Sorry, Peter Travers, but the American forces we see in this movie only blow it when they don't "shoot and bomb without regard to collateral damage...
...It's the Boo...
...occupying force starts shooting and bombing without regard to collateral damage," writes Peter Trav-ers in Rolling Stone...
...Scott in the New York Times to praise the movie for its "biting satire...
...God knows they mean well, and we're supposed to think of them as noble and heroic...
...military would respond to an outbreak of zombie violence in London...
...They are resisting unjust orders...
...Its pretentious fans will deliberately misunderstand 28 Weeks Later in order to mold its politics into something that reflects their views...
...It's not enough to praise 28 Weeks Later for having one of the most interesting and surprising plotlines in the history of horror movies, with the de rigueur shocking surprise ending that is (for once) genuinely shocking and surprising...
...When a director named Wes Craven made a cheap little movie about a bunch of rednecks turned into monsters by atomic waste called The Hills Have Eyes, he said he had been inspired by the work of the Swedish existentialist filmmaker Ingmar Bergman—particularly The Virgin Spring...
...There are astonishing scenes of kids wandering around an entirely empty London that generate the same how-on-earth-did-they-film-that wonderment generated by Cuaron in last year's Children of Men, the best-directed movie of the past decade...
...Later is extremely dark, extremely clever, and extremely terrifying, or that it leaves its predecessor, 28 Days Later, in the dust...
...So, if you want to take your warfight-ing wisdom on how to handle the enemy in Iraq from 28 Weeks Later, you will probably come up with something like the use of a neutron bomb on the world's Muslim countries...
...But no matter...
...The problem, as Edelstein ruefully acknowledges, is that the logic of 28 Weeks Later is not actually antiwar or anti-American...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 35
