(The film's one major flaw, an unbelievable ending involving a non-fatal shot through the stomach, is alleviated for those who prefer more believable endings by a believable and more-effective alternative ending on the DVD.) Whether or not the infected of 28 Days Later are "real” zombies or not is an argument of tertiary importance to a few other facts: The film re-introduced and help popularize the contemporary concept of fast and enraged zombies that are the stronghold of today's zombie films, and the film is one fucking excellent and effective piece of filmmaking, marred only by an unbelievable happy ending. (Fast and viral-crazed blood-thirsty maniacs that run were not unknown in horror before 28 Days Later, however, as the concept of a rage-like virus had already been explored by Romero in his other early low budget classic The Crazies and unstoppable fast-moving home surgeons are found in Umberto Lenzi's entertaining exploiter Incubo sulla città contaminate / Nightmare City. Technically, the fast-footed and crazed killers of the film are not zombies, as they are very much alive, but the single-minded urge to kill and eviscerate man that the virally infected of Boyle's film all share is analogous to the viral and hungry running dead as introduced two years later in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead ( trailer), a surprisingly excellent remake of George Romero's dated but still-great original from 1978 ( trailer). In the film, animal activists accidentally release "Rage", a fast-acting virus - we're talking in seconds - upon England that causes all those infected to turn into enraged killers. Way back in 2002, when some of you who are now wasting your life reading blogs like this were perhaps still reading Dick & Jane, the English maestro of style Danny Boyle helped reinvent the zombie film with the modern horror classic 28 Days Later ( trailer).
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