I hated 28 Days Later on many levels, but mainly because it was a lazy rehash of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead trilogy, with a few scenes cribbed from the BBC’s superb adaptation of Day of the Triffids, all wrapped up with a typically rubbish and nonsensical Alex Garland story and some fairly horrible acting and direction. I couldn’t understand all the fuss, and I certainly couldn’t understand why they’d even consider a sequel. I’d have avoided it like the plague except that it’s directed and written not by Boyle and Garland but by Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who was responsible for the superb and highly original thriller Intacto.

And lo and behold, Fresnadillo has done it again, turning what by rights should have been another misconceived horror sequel into a film that not only trounces its predecessor but is better than any zombie movie since Romero’s heyday. And okay, it’s not really a zombie movie since everyone knows that zombies don’t run and thanks to Garland we’re stuck with the idea that these are actually people infected with a virus that makes them really, really angry. But although 28 Weeks Later picks up directly after the first film and remains entirely faithful, it also stands perfectly well on its own and manages to rectify almost every failing of the original.

As if that wasn’t enough, Fresnadillo has succeeded in capturing, more than any other director in recent years and more even that Romero himself did in Land of the Dead, the atmosphere of sheer hopeless desperation and desolation that made Night of the Living Dead and its sequels so special. It also has the all-important social context - where Romero dealt with racism, consumerism and out-of-control militarism, 28 Weeks Later tackles the thorny subject of an occupying army trying to control an inherently aggressive population, and the landslide effect when it all starts to go wrong.

It’s not exactly hard to find real-world parallels in a plot involving the survivors of the original outbreak being moved back into a supposedly safe and virus free London only to find themselves under threat not only by the infected but by the US troops there to protect them. But Fresnadillo sensibly avoids direct allegory, instead presenting a series of powerful scenes that have all the grim authenticity of war zone news reports, with the only difference being that they’re happening in the capital city of England. Comparisons with last year’s superb Children of Men are justified, but where that film went primarily for the mind, Fresnadillo looks instead for a pure gut reaction - and gets it time after time, partly through some truly stomach-churning gore and violence but more often from the sense of wrongness provoked by, say, the sight of a major capital city being flooded with nerve gas.

What problems it has are primarily those that tend to curse genre movies - the script isn’t great (though it’s sparse enough not to matter), the story doesn’t bear too much scrutiny and the acting is distinctly patchy, with the worst performance coming from brilliantly-named child actor Mackintosh Muggleton. Of course, all said and done, it’s still a B-movie horror sequel and not an art-house movie. And that’s no bad thing, because it’s a great, gut-wrenching, pitch-dark horror film, and the violence is extreme enough to appeal to any gore-hound. But what really sets Fresnadillo’s film apart is that it taps into such up-to-the-minute fears, and for that reason 28 Weeks Later hits far deeper and more viscerally than any of the current crop of seventies throwback Texas Chainsaw Massacre clones could ever hope to.

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