You know what zombie movies never seem to have enough of? Dancing. They've got gore and screaming and lots of guttural snarling, but no boogie. That all changes with "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" and the dancing here is to — naturally off-kilter — 1980s heroes Duran Duran.

The fourth entry in an ever-more engrossing franchise is absolutely bonkers — 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.

Nia DaCosta directs from a returning Alex Garland script and it starts right where 2025's "28 Years Later" — directed by Danny Boyle — left off. If this is your first encounter with the series, you don't necessarily need to go back to 2002's "28 Days Later" but at least to last year's entry.

Garland's script crackles with jokes about Britain's National Health Service and "Teletubbies" 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.

We pick up immediately after Alfie Williams' Spike is rescued from a gang of zombies — excuse me, a gang of infected — 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's all grown up and become a sadistic satanist, which happens sometimes without good adulting.

Jimmy — played by a diabolical Jack O'Connell in a tracksuit and gold chains, like a low-level Mafia lieutenant from "The Sopranos" — 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.... Read More