The Manchester roadblock, which is indeed maintained by an uninfected Army unit, sets up the third act, which doesn't live up to the promise of the first two. I suppose movies like this have to end with the good and evil characters in a final struggle. Two years after a zombiepocalypse has all but wiped out civilization, only two outposts of humanity remain. The disease disaster movie on everyone's lips right now! Many of the films' most gruesome events are not what the infected do to the people, but rather what the people do to one another. The strength of Pontypool is its limited scope. If you're a sucker for found footage, try this movie about a quaint little town that turns into a breeding ground for a waterborne organism that takes control of the minds and bodies of its hosts. They worked in places where they sweated and got hurt, where supervisors monitored their bathroom breaks, a computer algorithm determined their schedules, and where they could only open the cash register with a fingerprint scanner under the watchful eye of an overhead security camera. Available on Netflix and Hulu. Like the protagonist at the start of 28 days laser eye. The coronavirus has officially forced much of the world into voluntary or involuntary quarantine. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of people have already died from COVID-19, and many more surely will — especially those who are forced back to work amidst the pandemic. A small group of unauthorized people sneak into one of the boats, but nearly capsize it in the process. Marx once observed that the tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living — and in many zombie movies, they gnaw on those brains, too.
Our hero, Marc, has been trapped in an office building, but sets out to find his girlfriend, and has to do so without ever actually setting foot beyond shelter. They are facing a cruel situation. But can anyone ever really trust happiness in the postapocalypse? The Resident movies will provide hours of quarantine entertainment on their own, beginning with the humble first film in which we meet our heroine, Alice, and get acquainted with the T-virus that has obliterated humanity thanks to a break in containment at the evil Umbrella corporation. Let's not forget that Ingmar Bergman's iconic masterpiece, in which Max von Sydow plays a knight returning from the Crusades who engages in a game of chess with Death himself, is in fact also a movie about the black plague. Like the protagonist at the start of 28 days laser.com. US military doctors arrive to "help", taking a sample of the virus to develop a biological weapon, and then wiping out the guerillas (and anti-colonial struggle) with an airstrike.
In Luchino Visconti's elegant adaptation of Thomas Mann's beloved novella, Dirk Bogarde plays a composer who visits the Italian city and promptly becomes infatuated with a teenage boy, all the while a cholera epidemic hits town. Based on the book by Michael Crichton, Strain focuses on a group of research scientists who are brought into the town of Piedmont, New Mexico, after a government satellite crashes there and kills almost all of the residents, thanks to a microscopic alien organism that the downed equipment brought to Earth. The story may be symbolic, but the tension throughout the film is still immensely powerful. The others are threatening to go where they do not belong. People must remain in their place; those who go where they do not belong endanger everyone. The legendary American dramatist and screenwriter Horton Foote adapted his own play (part of The Orphans' Home Cycle) for this understated drama about a small Texas town caught up in the final year of World War I when the influenza epidemic starts claiming lives. Mark: "OK, Jim, I've got some bad news. ") They're barricaded in a high-rise apartment, and use their hand-cranked radio to pick up a radio broadcast from an Army unit near Manchester. Since London seems empty at the beginning, presumably the zombies we see were survivors until fairly recently.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Selena becomes the dominant member of the group, the toughest and least sentimental, enforcing a hard-boiled survivalist line. What makes someone an "other"? She has to wander into nothingness in the hopes of reaching safety, and along the way she is followed by one single shuffling zombie who becomes a sort of companion/reminder of her fragile mortality and the mistakes she has made in her life. This Japanese movie is a little bit more outlandish with its deaths, with the infected liquifying into a green goop, but it's important to have a global perspective on outbreaks. Selena, a tough-minded black woman who is a realist, says the virus had spread to France and America before the news broadcasts ended; if someone is infected, she explains, you have 20 seconds to kill them before they turn into a berserk, devouring zombie. Edgar Allan Poe's short story — about a prince and other nobles holing themselves away in an abbey to avoid the Black Plague and then holding a masquerade ball into which the figure of Death slips — gets the loose, over-the-top Roger Corman treatment. At the same time, he meets a woman (Samara Weaving) who was just screwed over by his company, and together they agree to kill their way to the top.
Available on Tubi and Vudu. The logic of human disposability is woven into much of the cinema of the last three decades, after the "end of history" and the global triumph of neoliberal capitalism — particularly in movies about zombies, plagues, and apocalypses. For any hope of recovery, we cannot cede the public square, but rather we must reclaim it — courageously and with care for one another. The horde is at the gates. Caught up in a movie's narrative, we may identify with the central characters, but as we shuffle out of the darkness of the theater or watch the credits start to roll from our couch, we know that most of us belong to the crowd. Good-hearted Jim would probably have died if he hadn't met her. In the film itself, they become texture, non-characters, dissolving into the background. As mainstream punditry's false equivalencies remind us, populism is dangerous. Though we shout, the powerful do not hear us. Newly arrived in New Orleans, heroic doctor Richard Widmark finds himself trying to deal with a deadly outbreak of "pneumonic plague, " which has begun to spread through the city's immigrant underclass.
Writer and director Danny Boyle changed the zombie genre forever with 28 Days Later, in which a handful of survivors come together a month after a mysterious virus has decimated the U. K. and try to survive long enough to be rescued. My imagination is just diabolical enough that when that jet fighter appears toward the end, I wish it had appeared, circled back--and opened fire. In the final scene of 28 Days Later, a 2002 movie about a virus that transforms people into rage-filled monsters, a fighter jet scrambles over the English countryside. There have been multiple very good film versions of Body Snatchers, but we will most highly recommend the version starring Donald Sutherland as a San Francisco man who starts to suspect that people around him are acting strangely because of some sinister force, instead of just a benign illness. So once Faust has a taste of the power that comes from darkness, he finds himself in not only a battle for his soul but all of the world. David Cronenberg is the master of body horror, and in this 1977 film, he focuses on a woman who develops a strange growth under her arm after a surgery that she uses to feed on human blood.
Trench 11 is set during the last days of WWI, and is centered on a group of allied soldiers who are sent to investigate a secret German bunker that, they will discover, houses a grotesque secret that could turn the tide of the war. As they fall for each other, they go through these surges of emotion. This grotesquely violent and gruesome adventure was supposed to be Dutch wunderkind Verhoeven's big splash into English-language filmmaking; audiences ran screaming, but it has since become a big cult item. Humanity is not disposable. The catastrophes portended by the neoliberal cinematic imagination — taking shape before our eyes today — can still be averted. "28 Days Later" is a tough, smart, ingenious movie that leads its characters into situations where everything depends on their (and our) understanding of human nature. In Train to Busan (2016) and 28 Days Later (2002), however, such "zombies" are not reanimated corpses; rather, they are human beings morphed into monstrous creatures by an infection. Their vision is lacking; they do not see us waving and unfurling our banners on the lawn. The setup is a familiar one, but the portent, the violence, the sense of a world abandoned by God's mercy would give Paul Verhoeven a run for his money. Defeating fascism will require a mass movement of historic proportions led by the multi-racial working class. The ending is disappointing--an action shoot-out, with characters chasing one another through the headquarters of a rogue Army unit--but for most of the way, it's a great ride. Doctors race to find a cure and save the town, deus ex vaccinum. Highly literary and earnest, it is nevertheless a beautifully acted and elegantly mounted tale, balancing the intimate and the epic, and grandiosity with harrowing tragedy.
It echoed again in early May 2020, as health care workers demanding sufficient personal protective equipment, living wages, and regular testing to support their efforts to battle the COVID-19 pandemic instead got a state-sponsored flyover from the Blue Angels. The shouts of "Give me liberty or give me death! " In Paul Verhoeven's ridiculously sleazy and disturbing 1985 medieval epic, Rutger Hauer leads a group of mercenaries and captives (among them Jennifer Jason Leigh) into a castle infected with bubonic plague. These workers — usually women and people of color — have jobs which have been designated as essential. That 20-second limit serves three valuable story purposes: (a) It has us counting "12... 11... 10" in our minds at one crucial moment; (b) it eliminates the standard story device where a character can keep his infection secret; and (c) it requires the quick elimination of characters we like, dramatizing the merciless nature of the plague.
These zombies are capitalism's worst nightmare: an unruly and destructive crowd whose ascendancy breaks down the existing order that produced them. The Girl With All the Gifts. And infected with a deadly pathogen. It's sometimes easy to forget that this classic melodrama, starring a tremendous Bette Davis as a headstrong woman in antebellum New Orleans and a brooding Henry Fonda as her straight-arrow paramour, actually becomes a story about a yellow-fever epidemic. Postapocalypse (and More Zombies). It's not so much a plague movie as it is a family drama, centering on a dry goods' shop owner and his extended family, including his wife's teenage fuck-up brother, played by a young Matthew Broderick.
The crowd is never allowed to make an intervention as a protagonist; in most of these imagined futures, the crowd does not have a place. That's what happens in the appropriately titled Blindness. World War Z. Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos star in this epic contagion movie that features maybe the largest mass of sprinting zombies ever put on screen. The first feature film from director James Gunn, Slither is set in a small town where everyone knows each other that is overrun by an alien plague. While humanity is being brought to its knees by a rapidly spreading infection, we only experience the crisis through the perspective of an Ontario radio disc jockey who is receiving sporadic reports of the mayhem outside. Pitt plays a former United Nations investigator who agrees to make his way through the infected landscape to find the source of the outbreak and hopefully a cure before everyone falls to the pandemic.
Director Elia Kazan, himself the child of Greek immigrants, films the drama with compassion and complexity. You can't just kill Gwyneth like that! ) Available on iTunes. But the two of them will have to travel through a dangerous no-man's-land to get there, and that means dealing with all the threats along the way. Life imitated art in September 2005, as President George W. Bush looked down from his helicopter at spray-painted pleas for help on the rooftops of New Orleans, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. In a lesser movie, there would be a love scene between Selena and Jim, but here the movie finds the right tone in a moment where she pecks him on the cheek, and he blushes. Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage star as the main dull, suburban, upper-middle-class couple who are suddenly seized by the single-minded obsession to murder their kids. Now they risk losing their temporarily-improved unemployment benefits if their boss demands they go back to work. You could watch any old zombie outbreak movie during your contagion binge, but there was a small wave of movies during the mid-2010s that focused on the ennui of the end of the world more than the panicky horror of the outbreaks themselves.
Social movements are breathing life back into the world, reclaiming it for all of humanity — and we are planting our flags to summon others to our side, to build a more powerful crowd. Not that we are thinking much about evolution during the movie's engrossing central passages. If humanity lives, they owe it to the very experts responsible for the crisis in the first place. The Night Eats the World.
To survive, they must learn to work together in a world where they can be their brother's keeper or their brother's reaper.