I liked 28 DAYS LATER when it came out in 2003 and I liked 28 WEEKS LATER when it came out in 2007, but I still have never revisited them. So I’m honestly very surprised how invested I am in this followup trilogy that started last year with Danny Boyle’s 28 YEARS LATER and now continues with Nia DaCosta’s 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE.

It was such a surprising choice: Boyle and writer Alex Garland finally made their long anticipated third film, but also prepared a script for the director of LITTLE WOODS and CANDYMAN 2021 to shoot back-to-back with it. Boyle’s movie set up the new characters, and now DaCosta continues their story, but other than a few homages during zombie attacks she doesn’t mimic Boyle’s style at all. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, WIDOWS, THE RHYTHM SECTION), editor Jake Roberts (HELL OR HIGH WATER, MEN) and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (JOKER, TÁR) all go in very different directions from the distinct ones Boyle’s team chose, giving us a calmer and more traditional (not shot on iPhones) but still very effective look at this world of a zombie infection pandemic and its survivors.

In the first 28 YEARS a boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) left the safety of his colony for a rite of passage: his first mainland zombie hunt. In the process he lost his mom, lost faith in his dad, abandoned his home and got rescued by a gang of scary crazies in track suits and long blond wigs. Now their psychotic ringleader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell, FERRARI) offers Spike a trial to become one of his acolytes, who he calls his “Fingers.” Spike just has to win a death match against one of the current members is all. So it’s really more of a chance for a guy to kill a little kid than it is an audition.

I found the introduction of the Jimmies at the end of the last movie to be pretty jarring. They seemed so tonally different from what we’d been watching, and alot to swallow even before I read about the cultural context that their look is based on an English radio and TV host who was exposed as a child molester. Jimmy Crystal’s origin story opens that film – he was one of a group of kids sheltered together watching Teletubbies when the rage virus shit hit the fan, and then he witnessed his minister father letting zombies eat him, welcoming them as the kick off to the end times. As a post-apocalyptic adult Jimmy has turned himself into a cult/gang leader, who seems to really believe he’s the son of “Old Nick” (Satan), and hears his voice telling him what to do. They basically commit depraved Manson Family type crimes, doing home invasions, tying people up, tormenting them with these chances to fight the Fingers. But he frames it all as religious ritual, sermonizing, calling it “charity” when the members skin people alive.

If Spike can’t join them they’re gonna kill him, so he gives it a shot. It’s basically the adult Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall) bullying and beating up a kid, taunting him, knocking the knife out of his hand, giving it back, knocking it out again. To the Jimmies’ shock and surprise Spike figures out a way to beat him. Maybe it just pushed my particular buttons but I felt this was more upsetting and disgusting than your average screen death – one of those rare acts of cinematic violence that really gets under my skin. It’s a type of injury you don’t see in many movies, and just a very distressing way to die that turns him from sadistic bully to scared kid as he realizes what’s happening. And all the sudden the Jimmies didn’t seem so silly to me.

Spike comes along as the new Jimmy. Doesn’t seem to think he has a choice. Some seem pissed at him for killing their friend Jimmy Shite, even though it’s their stupid rules he was following. The one Jimmy that seems to have a little empathy left is Jimmy Ink, a good use of Erin Kellyman, who made an impression on me in the small part of Enfys Nest in SOLO so I paid attention to her when she showed up in THE GREEN KNIGHT, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Disney+ sequel series to WILLOW that was pretty fun but no longer exists because it got Zaslav-ed. She has a strong screen presence that works well for a character who has to convey so much with her expressions, but also pairs well with the gaudy costume and occasional cool knife slashes.

The gang also includes Jimmy Fox (Sam Locke), Jimmy Snake (Ghazi Al Ruffai), Jimmy Jones (Maura Bird) and Jimmy Jimmy (Robert Rhodes), but the other most memorable one is the particularly crazed Jimmima (Emma Laird, THE BRUTALIST), who taunts victims with “The Tinky Winky Dance.” I assume Jimmy Crystal taught them all about Teletubbies, since he seems older and pop culture ended 28 years ago. But they love to joke about them and I found it bleakly hilarious when some of their horrific violence was followed by an, “Again again!”

Since Jimmy and the Fingers encountered Spike, that means they’re within walking distance of the titular Bone Temple, which appeared scary-as-fuck in 28 YEARS LATER until we got to know its creator Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, THE AVENGERS) and accept that he was not a psycho, but a thoughtful and sensitive man genuinely honoring the dead by cleaning their remains and building them into an ossuary. The heart of THE BONE TEMPLE is the story of Kelson and the Alpha zombie he named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry, “Negative Dude,” THE RUNNING MAN 2025).

You remember Samson. The big muscle guy with the giant veins and Coke-can-sized dong who stalks the area, roaring and ripping heads off with the spines still attached. This time there’s a great scene where he’s snacking on brains out of the top of a skull he cracked open and I realized it was just like me sitting there watching him and munching popcorn.

A key development in 28 YEARS LATER was Kelson’s choice to drug Samson with blowdarts rather than attempt to fight him. It was smarter than waging a battle he would’ve lost, but it came out of his belief that zombies are still people. THE BONE TEMPLE pays that off. ONE SENTENCE SPOILER: Samson comes back wanting to be shot up with morphine again, so they start to hang out and get high together, eventually bringing the zombie to a mental state where he has some memories.

We no longer have the novelty of coming in expecting Kelson to be a maniac and realizing he’s got the best attitude of anyone in the movie. But we do have the benefit of being comfortable that he’s not going to turn evil, so we can just enjoy hanging out with him. He’s surrounded by skeletons but he has a real appreciation for life, from contemplating in nature to dancing to old music. He only owns a handful of records, so his life is mostly soundtracked by Duran Duran.

So we’ve got this meditative story about the peace between Kelson and Samson, but it’s threatened by the proximity of the Jimmies who are wandering the land hungry like the wolf, tormenting those they encounter. Though DaCosta gives us some bits of good ol’ zombie gore (special makeup effects creative supervisor: John Nolan, THE NUTCRACKER: THE UNTOLD STORY), most of the horror is the much more disturbing living-on-living kind. The Fingers terrorize a family of survivors on a small farm and force Tom (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING) to choose one to fight to the death. Just like the opening scene, I found this to cut deeper than the average horror concept, because it forced me to consider what I would do in Tom’s place. Jimmima seems like the one who would be easiest to overpower, and therefore the smartest strategic choice, but if it was easy, wouldn’t that kind of make it worse? Would I have a harder time going through with it than if I really had to fight for it? And would I ever forgive myself? Wouldn’t I feel better about it if it was one of those asshole guys?

Well, kind of a moot point, because he does choose Jimmima and quickly regrets it. But this is a sequence that sent my mind to ugly places before exploding into some very entertaining, chaotic mayhem and dark humor. Feels like a possible classic.

Eventually Jimmy Crystal and Dr. Kelson will collide, and upside-down-cross-wearing Jimmy will have to decide what to make of a weirdo with iodine-stained skin living surrounded by piles of skulls. We’ll get to experience the science vs. religion debate through the novel angle of self-declared atheist vs. satanist. As we know from his turn as the dancing master vampire in SINNERS, O’Connell can layer the charismatic, the humorous and the sinister in interesting ways, and here again he gets to mix the nuanced with the outrageous. We have to gauge how much he really believes his bullshitting has come true.

Fiennes is unsurprisingly superb in the movie. It’s just such a treat that he gets to play a very memorable horror character who stands out for just being human and kind and gentle. He’s more subtle and down to earth than in plenty of his dramas, though this also offers him a unique opportunity to display other talents. There was a shot of Kelson in the trailer that reminded me of the monsters dancing around at the beginning of NIGHTBREED, and I didn’t understand how that would make sense for his character. If I had tried to guess I wouldn’t have gotten it in a million years. I’ll leave it for you to discover, except to say that there’s a strange scene that is hilarious and beautiful and filled me with joy even in the midst of tension and tragedy. It’s a really funny turn of events that also I think celebrates some things about life and culture. It works on different levels. I like movies.

I don’t want to say whether this is better than or not as good as 28 YEARS LATER, because I see it both ways. The first one was better in the sense that it felt much more new, it introduced most of these characters and the state of this world, and though this is a beautifully made film on all levels it’s easy to miss the wilder, more punk rock energy of Anthony Dod Mantle’s iPhones and the Young Fathers’ music. I wonder if Boyle’s movie might also have a little more to chew on in terms of both ideas and heavy emotions. But if so they’re presented in a much more scattershot fashion, thrown out there more as suggestion or set up than as exploration. I appreciate that THE BONE TEMPLE feels neater and more complete on its own, a more solid, satisfying storytelling experience. It’s a good sequel because it takes the hand off of these characters and ideas and carries them all the way to the finish line. (Well, okay, I guess it hands off a couple of them to the next runner, which will be Boyle, unless the unimpressive box office of this one un-greenlights the finale.)

I didn’t know I really cared about an ongoing 28 UNITS LATER saga, but these two YEARS episodes have been some of the better horror movies of the period and an impressive use of the “horror franchise” format. THE BONE TEMPLE will obviously live on as one of my go-to joke sequel subtitles (along with FAREWELL TO THE FLESH) and in references to, you know, doing it, but I’m happy to report that it’s also a good movie I very much recommend to my fellow horror partakers. Please enjoy all of your visits to any and all Bone Temples.