TARANTULA ( 1955)

Another splendid science fiction come horror film by film director Jack Arnold.My prevoius review of ' THEM ' was released a year earlier and has a similar beginning , being part of the popular 'Giant Insect ' cycle of the period. Rather than having the little girl fleeing from the unseen THEM Arnold has a strangely distorted man with head and hands twisted into bestiality, jump out into the desertr and collapse as the title credits appear.

Performances are much better than average in TARANTULA. Leo G Carroll ( remember him in ' The Man From U.N.C.L.E ) plays a biochemist experimenting with artificial nutrients which consequently have devastating abnormal effects not only on man but also a huge TARANTULA which escapes from the laboratory.

John Agar and Mara Corday, are also smoothly effective with some touches of humor.Look out near the end for a fleeting glimpse of a young and uncredited Clint Eastwood as the fighter pilot who drops some napalm.

Universals desert town standing set is used to great advantage as it did in THE MONOLITH MONSTERS. Used here as a focus of action and a bridge to the rather more threatening world which lurks just beyond the lamplight. Arnolds feel for the desert is once again perfectly realised.

Obviously the special effects are not up to todays standards but what we have here is all atmosphere throughout and not like todays CGI perfectly rendered mostly lifeless FX. Travelling mattes and giant sets were mainly used making the spider appear enormous. I think we can forgive tha fact that the spiders legs don't seem to touch the ground.

GOOD EGG

28 Weeks Later ( 2007 )

Zombies are once again wreaking havoc in england in this sequel to 28 days Later. This as another great attempt at rejuvenating the zombie film and injecting it with new life. I found this film even more disturbing and scarier than the previous.

Directed this time around by Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo with Danny Boyle ( director of 28 Days Later ) as co producer. He certainly piles on the non stop action in this one with numerous chase scenes and out and out gut wrenching zombie rage.

After the initial outbreak of the rage virus , 28 Weeks Later takes place in a post plague London. Thousands of people begin to rebuild there lives in a quarantined section of Canary Warf where the majority of the action takes place.One can probably fore guess what's going to happen .... red alert is announced as the viral infestation begins to take hold and overcome everyone except most of the american soldiers, and whats left of a small group which tries to escape via helicopter from Wembley satdium.

Great sequel to the original then. If you like more action you will probably enjoy this one more. Personally i found 28 Days Later the better of the two.

PAR BOILED

28 Days Later ( 2002 )

Directed by Danny Boyle 28 Days later is a post - apocalyptic sci fi come horror film.

As such this is a pretty good film and compares rather favoroubly to the more famous horror films made by George A. Romero. Emphasis here however seems to be much more focused on the small group of people escaping from the diseased ridden zombies as they travel across country to find refuge with like minded survivors and eventually wind up at an army blockade led by none other than Christopher Eccleston. Yes folks this is a british film and starts out being centered around London when Jim ( Cillian Murphy ) awakens from a coma and finds himself alone in a deserted hospital where he is recovering from some accident.One scene i found a complete rip off though from George A Romeros Dawn of the Dead was the very similar supermarket sequence, but much less effectively done here where they raid a store picking up items willy nilly from the shelves.

Definitely worth a look see this one although it doesn't come across as scarey when compared to similar more greater films. Another odd thing is that unlike the slow moving zombies in the classic Romero films , these are extremely agile and fast moving.

GOOD EGG