By Susan Granger
Determined to continue Danny Boyle’s bleak, dystopian franchise, screenwriter Alex Garland and director Nia DaCosta create a bizarre, somewhat incoherent installment: “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” – now available for rent on Amazon Prime.
Reaching beyond the ghoulish brain-eaters known as zombies, this hardcore horror thriller, set in a post-apocalyptic world, re-introduces deranged-yet-erudite Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who built an ominous Bone Temple – ‘an ossuary’- an immense pyramid of bleached skulls, surrounded by tall, thin towers of trussed-together bones, resembling white bamboo columns – as a monument to death.
Eager to restore some semblance of order, visionary, doused-in-orange-iodine Kelson befriends a docile ‘Alpha’ – a huge, hulking zombie he calls Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – compassionately injecting him with morphine darts and with whom he actually manages to communicate.
“Pride moves inside me like maggots in the corpse of Christ!” Kelson proclaims.
Meanwhile, brave young Spike (Alfie Williams) – from the previous film – has fallen in with a savage Satanic cult, headed by crazed evangelist ‘Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell),’ who witnessed his father, a rural vicar, possessed by the virulent rage virus, and has since sworn allegiance to “Old Nick” – a.k.a. the Devil – a voice in his head.
Known as Jimmy’s ‘Fingers,’ these Satanists pillage-for-pleasure – and an ultra-violent, torture-porn segment in which they raid a farmhouse and flay its inhabitants – is filled with stomach-turning grisly gore, as is the bloody, climactic crucifixion – thanks to cinematographer Sean Bobbitt.
Working from Alex Garland’s heavy-handed script, director Nia DaCosta relies on spectacle since there’s little or no social commentary and/or emotional connection to the characters. According to Sony publicity, her goal was to create a film that was “bonkers, idiosyncratic, and artistically personal.”
FYI: The titular ossuary consists of about 5,000 skulls and 150,000 bones, each individually cast and assembled.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is a fierce, ferocious 4, available to rent on Amazon Prime.
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Susan Granger
Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in Journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has appeared on radio and television as an anchorwoman and movie critic for many years. Read all her reviews at susangranger.com.
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