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They\u2019ve got gore and screaming and lots of guttural snarling, but no boogie. That all changes with \u201c28 Years Later: The Bone Temple\u201d and the dancing here is to \u2014 naturally off-kilter \u2014 1980s heroes Duran Duran.<\/a><\/p>\n The fourth entry in an ever-more engrossing franchise is absolutely bonkers \u2014 and a triumph. It mixes dark, queasy disembowelment and laugh-out-loud humor in a way that both subverts the genre and leads a way out of it, too.<\/p>\n Nia DaCosta<\/a> directs from a returning Alex Garland script and it starts right where 2025\u2019s \u201c28 Years Later\u201d<\/a> \u2014 directed by Danny Boyle \u2014 left off. If this is your first encounter with the series, you don\u2019t necessarily need to go back to 2002\u2019s \u201c28 Days Later\u201d but at least to last year\u2019s entry.<\/p>\n Garland\u2019s script crackles with jokes about Britain\u2019s National Health Service and \u201cTeletubbies\u201d as it sets up an ultimate showdown between good and evil across a flower-and-meadow countryside. DaCosta is fabulous, leaning into the dark and the light with assurance, nailing the twisted tone and celebrating the weirdness.<\/p>\n We pick up immediately after Alfie Williams\u2019 Spike is rescued from a gang of zombies \u2014 excuse me, a gang of infected \u2014 by another gang of predators led by Sir Jimmy Crystal, whom we first met as an 8-year-old orphan in the last movie. He\u2019s all grown up and become a sadistic satanist, which happens sometimes without good adulting.<\/p>\n Jimmy \u2014 played by a diabolical Jack O\u2019Connell in a tracksuit and gold chains, like a low-level Mafia lieutenant from \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d \u2014 leads a band of young psychopaths, as deadly to both virus survivors as the snarling, semi-human infected. They don blond wigs and each is named Jimmy.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a whiff of \u201cA Clockwork Orange\u201d about them \u2014 menacing, prone to ultraviolence, gleeful in destruction. \u201cDoes that sound like normal screaming, Jimmy?\u201d one asks. Spike, bless his heart, doesn\u2019t belong here.<\/p>\n Sir Jimmy\u2019s opposite number is also out there, the scientist-doctor Dr. Ian Kelson, who hopes to find a cure for the virus. He\u2019s a humanist, with a huge heart and open arms, even if he does construct tall pillars out of the bleached bones of the dead. That sounds bad, but he does it to memorialize them, an in memoriam segment made out of calcium.<\/p>\n