28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – Blood and Porridge

May 11, 2026May 19, 2026

Films I’d like to see remade (Part 2)

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Here are some more films I remember fondly from my youth that, with sufficient love and skill, I think could be remade as wonderful new films.

Dark of the Sun (1968)

When, in my early teens, I saw this action / adventure / war movie on late-night TV, I believed it was the toughest movie ever. At least, I believed that until I saw William Friedkin’s nail-biting Sorcerer (1977), itself a remake, of Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), which promptly stole its crown as Most Badass Film I’d Ever Seen.

But no matter – Dark of the Sun, or The Mercenaries as it was also known, still seemed pretty hardcore to me. Why, it even had a chainsaw fight in it! Thanks to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies (1974 onwards) and the Evil Dead movies (1981 onwards), and to one-off entries like Motel Hell (1980) and Mandy (2018), chainsaw fights are ten a penny nowadays. But back then, seeing someone lunge at someone else with a whirring, metal-toothed power tool was an intense experience.

Based on a 1965 Wilbur Smith novel and directed by Jack Cardiff, Dark of the Sun tells the story of some mercenaries being sent into action amidst the Simbas rebellion in early 1960s Congo. It stars Robert Taylor, Yvette Mimieux – Taylor and Mimieux reunited eight years after appearing in George Pal’s charming 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine – Jim Brown, Kenneth More (subverting his usual, cuddly English-gentleman image by playing an alcoholic doctor) and Peter Carsten (playing a vile, child-murdering Nazi). At the time, critics lambasted the film for what they saw as its extreme violence. However, as Cardiff noted, the violence depicted didn’t come anywhere near the real atrocities that’d happened in the Congo then, or near the violence featured in movies in later decades.

I’d like to see a remake of Dark of the Sun that updates the intensity, grittiness and violence to fit with 2026 sensibilities and that places the action within the context of 2026 geopolitics. And is more racially sensitive – any racism in the original movie went over my 13-year-old head but I’m sure that, viewing it today, I’d cringe at parts of it. At the very least, and despite the presence of Jim Brown as one of the mercenaries, I suspect I’d find it infused with a ‘white saviour’ or ‘white man’s burden’ complex.

Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this film (as is Martin Scorsese) so, as I did with Von Ryan’s Express (1965), I recommend old Quent as the man to helm a remake of it. I know he’s sworn that he’s only going to make ten films in his lifetime, and his next one will be his last, but I don’t believe that for an instant.

Come to think of it, Dark of the Sun has quite a few things in common with Von Ryan’s Express, including a cracking movie film poster designed by the splendid Frank McCarthy and the presence of Nazis. And like the earlier film, Dark of the Sun prominently features a train.

As does my next candidate for a modern remake, which is….

© Granada Films

Horror Express (1972)

The much-loved British-Spanish movie Horror Express is set on a train hurtling across Siberia in the early 20^th century. The train is being stalked by a decomposing ape-man fossil that’s seemingly come back to life – in fact, it’s possessed by an alien lifeforce and has the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs. Trying to thwart it are British scientists Sir Alexander Saxon (Christopher Lee) and Dr Wells (Peter Cushing). Things become even more complicated in the film’s final act when the train is invaded by a bunch of Cossack soldiers, led by Telly Savalas’s villainous Captain Kazan.

Directed by Eugenio Martin, Horror Express is basically The Thing (1982) set on board the train from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes. Saxon and Wells are variations on the characters of Charters and Caldicott, the stuffy but unflappable English cricket-lovers in Hitchcock’s movie who get caught up in the chaos. That said, you never feel Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are playing anyone other than themselves in Horror Express. During their careers, the two actors made 22 movies together, were close friends offscreen and have an effortless chemistry here.

The decaying ape-man in the original movie is still icky, but it would be nice to see it in a modern remake with a decent special-effects budget where it could do properly mind-blowing, spectacularly gruesome Thing-like things. To play Saxon and Wells, you’d need a pair of British actors who’ve worked together already and possess some of that Lee-Cushing chemistry – maybe Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, from the BBC TV show Sherlock (2010-17)?

And to play Savalas’s murderous Captain Kazan, there can be only one man: Nicolas Cage.

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Until recently, I’d have been aghast at the thought of anyone remaking Douglas Hickox’s brilliant horror comedy Theatre of Blood, wherein Vincent Price plays an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor called Edward Lionheart. Enraged by the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, Lionheart murders them one by one using methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays. “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus. A very distinguished cast of English character actors goes the same way as Morley: Michael Hordern, Dennis Price, Arthur Lowe, Harry Andrews, Robert Coote and Coral Browne.

© Harbour Productions Ltd / Cineman Productions / United Artists

There’s no shortage of famous modern-day British thespians who could play the supporting cast of doomed theatre critics in a remake – I’d enjoy seeing James Corden get the Titus Andronicus treatment – but surely, surely nobody could recreate the absolutely delicious performance that Vincent Price gives as Lionheart in the original movie?

Well, I thought that until I saw Ralph Fiennes in this year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Now I’m pretty sure he could be the Vincent Price of 2026. And actually, Fiennes has played a character not dissimilar to Lionheart in 2022’s The Menu.

And if Fiennes wasn’t available, I suppose they could always call on Matt Berry.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die is a low-budget horror movie with an irresistible premise. It’s about a millionaire big-game hunter, played by Calvin Lockhart, determined to bag a werewolf. He rigs up his country estate with CCTV cameras and motion sensors, procures a helicopter and invites five unsavoury people to visit for a few days convinced that one of them is a werewolf. Among those playing Lockhart’s house-guests and staff are Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring and a youthful Michael Gambon. Needless to say, there is a werewolf present, but it gradually turns the tables on Lockhart and his hi-tech equipment, whilst also bumping off the supporting cast.

The ideas is irresistible, as I said, but watching The Beast Must Die on TV as a kid was a frustrating experience. Due to the inevitable budgetary constraints, Lockhart’s mansion house and grounds aren’t that hi-tech and the werewolf, when it appears, just looks like a big dog. You’d think the sequence where the werewolf takes out a helicopter would be thrilling, but it isn’t. Let’s remake this one with a proper budget, so that it’s as awesome as it sounded on paper in 1974.

From wikipedia.org / © Amicus Productions / British Lion Films

Juggernaut (1974)

The most underrated but, in my mind, the greatest of 1970s disaster movies, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut is mostly set on a British ocean liner stuck out in the stormy north Atlantic. An anonymous call to the company that owns the liner informs it that half-a-dozen bombs have been stashed on board and they’ll explode unless a ransom is paid. With weather conditions too severe to allow the ship’s crew and passengers to be evacuated, and the authorities forbidding the company to pay the ransom – which would be surrendering to terrorism – a team of bomb-disposal experts led by Fallon (Richard Harris) and his sidekick Charlie (David Hemmings) are sent to try and make the bombs safe.

Back on dry land, a policeman (Anthony Hopkins), whose family are among those trapped on the ship, tries to discover the bomber’s identity. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but when a twitchy Freddie Jones appears onscreen, you know who it is.

Juggernaut has a wonderful cast all round – not just the three ‘H’s of Harris, Hemmings and Hopkins, but also Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, Clifton James, Julian Glover and many more. But the show is quietly stolen by Roy Kinnear, playing the ship’s entertainment officer, who has the thankless task of keeping the passengers’ spirits up when at any moment they could be blown to smithereens. When he organises a fancy-dress party, one passenger appears dressed as the Grim Reaper and carrying a round black object with BOMB written on it.

As well as being massively suspenseful, the film offers social commentary. The ship is called the Britannic and it’s not difficult to see Juggernaut as a meditation on the sorry plight of Britain in the mid-1970s, its days as a world power well behind it, being battered by global events it had no power over, such as the Oil Crisis. In 2026, a decade after Brexit and during the chaotic era of Trump, a remake of Juggernaut would be both more poignant and more cutting.

You could also cast, in a Juggernaut remake, the sons of three of its original stars, now well established as actors in their own right: Jared Harris, Toby Jones and Rory Kinnear. But it’d be fun to see them in roles different from those their dads played. Kinnear as the policeman, Jones as the entertainment officer, Harris as the bomber?

© Two Roads / United Artists

January 29, 2026January 30, 2026

Ralph’s extraordinary world

© Columbia Pictures

The recently released 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the latest in the series of British zombie movies that began with 28 Days Later (2002). It’s also a direct sequel to last year’s 28 Years Later. Though I had a few reservations about 28 Years Later, which was scripted by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, creators of the original 2002 film, it generally impressed me. I felt wary about the forthcoming Bone Temple, though, because one of my 28 Years Later reservations was how it ended and set up its sequel.

I wrote at the time: “Its last minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that. I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script. Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar against the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously. This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).”

Happily, having just seen 28 Year Later: The Bone Temple, I realise I had nothing to worry about. It isn’t goofy or cartoony at all. Actually, Nia DaCosta shoots her movie in a more measured, controlled style than Boyle shot his – he filmed with numerous iPhone cameras, edited frenziedly, and intercut the action with clips from old war documentaries and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Parts of DaCosta’s film are so still and character-focused you feel you’re watching a stage-play. And overall, it’s a near-perfect blend of horror, violence, humour, pathos and, yes, optimism. I’d even rate it as the best of the 28 Days / Weeks / Years Later movies – praise indeed, since I think the previous three films are all quality. (I know the 2007 installment, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, gets some grief. But, apart from one idiotic lapse in plot logic, I like it.)

A warning. From here on, there’ll be spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

So, what was that ‘dark episode in recent British history’ referenced at the end of 28 Years Later? Well, it concluded with its juvenile hero Spike (Alfie Wiliams) being rescued from the infected – the series’ name for the humans who’ve succumbed to the ‘rage virus’ and transformed into slavering, red-eyed, hyperactive zombies – by eight youths wearing tracksuits, bling and long, blonde wigs. Their leader, played by Jack O’Connell, introduces himself as ‘Sir Jimmy’. Indeed, they’re all called ‘Jimmy’: Jimmy Shite, Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Snake, etc. Wandering around this post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested hellscape is a gang fixated on Jimmy Savile.

At this point, British viewers of 28 Years Later went, “Eek!” Everyone else in the world probably went, “Huh?”

Savile, in case you didn’t know, was a British disc jockey, children’s TV presenter and charity fundraiser – in his lifetime he raised around 40 million pounds – who died in 2011. With his long, greasy locks of blonde hair, penchant for tracksuits, cigars and bling, and irritating, homemade patois (“Now then, now then, as it happens, goodness gracious, how’s about that then, guys ‘n’ gals?”), he cut a grotesque figure, but was regarded as a saint because of his charity work. One year after his death, though, he turned into a modern-day folk-demon when it became apparent he’d been a sexual predator who’d abused children, young women and others on an industrial scale – often patients in hospitals he’d raised funds for. In fact, there’d been rumours about his evil proclivities while he was alive, but he never faced justice thanks to his saintly image and connections with the political and media establishments.

28 Years Later began with a prologue, seemingly unlinked to the rest of the film, wherein during the rage virus’s original outbreak in 2002 a group of children are stuck in a room watching a Teletubbies (1997-2001) video while their parents try, unsuccessfully, to barricade the house against an army of the infected. Only one small boy escapes and he flees into a nearby church. There, he sees his father, the local cleric, get attacked, transform and then seemingly lead the other infected off in a macabre, marauding dance. The boy, it transpires, becomes Sir Jimmy, O’Connell’s character. Grown up, his brain is an unhinged cocktail of zombie trauma, garbled religious dogma (from his father) and obsolete British pop culture (from the TV) – in the films’ alternative timeline, civilization ended in 2002, so Savile’s crimes were never revealed. Thus, Sir Jimmy enthuses about Teletubbies and has trained one of his gang, Jimmima (Emma Laird), to do a Teletubbies dance-routine. Also, echoing Savile, he frequently talks about ‘charity’ – though he uses the word as a euphemism for ‘torture’.

For Sir Jimmy’s gang are Clockwork Orange-type psychopaths. He’s convinced them he’s the son of the devil and they’re on a holy, or unholy, mission to slaughter the infected and uninfected alike in what’s left of Britain. Spike, fallen into their clutches and forced to join their ranks, spends 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple trying to stay alive and figure out how to escape from them.

The movie has a second plot-strand, concerning Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whom we also met in the previous film. He’s a hermit who, in the middle of the countryside, has created a spectacular ‘bone temple’ – a structure built from the skeletal remains of the victims of the 28-year-long contagion that also honours those victims. Kelson is certainly eccentric, but he’s decent and humane too and he’s managed to find a way of peacefully co-existing with the dangerous, brutal world around him.

Emblematic of that danger and brutality is Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – the name Kelson has given an ‘alpha’ member of the infected who stalks the environs of the temple. Alphas are specimens bigger, stronger and even more dangerous than the ordinary infected. Kelson uses morphine-tipped darts fired from a blowpipe to subdue Samson as he approaches, but he’s noticed that Samson has been coming back to the temple more often. It’s as if he enjoys the doses of morphine he’s getting. This inspires Kelson to experiment on the alpha. How much, he wonders, of what’s wrong with the infected is a virus and how much is psychosis? If the psychosis can be calmed – possibly lifted? – by drugs, what remains of the victim’s mind and memories? Though Spike’s dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) claimed in the previous film that the infected don’t have souls, Kelson, as his relationship with Samson develops, realises something of a soul does linger in the infected’s simultaneously terrifying and pitiful husks.

So, Spike is trapped among the Jimmies, Fiennes is improbably bonding with Samson and, ominously, we know these two storylines are going to crash together sooner or later with painful results for everyone. One thing I like about The Bone Temple, again scripted by Alex Garland, is that for all the simplicity of its plotting, it’s less predictable than you’d expect. I’d assumed the Jimmies would intrude violently on Kelson with a ‘home invasion’ of his bone temple, but what happens is more complex. I’d also seen people assume online before the film’s release that the Jimmies would kill Kelson and an enraged Samson would go on the rampage, or the Jimmies would kill Samson and an enraged Kelson would go on the rampage – but neither happens here. The real outcome is unexpectedly hopeful, funny, sad and satisfying. And the long-awaited scene when Sir Jimmy and Kelson finally come face to face is splendid in both its drama and its restraint. Generally, while O’Connell’s performance is great, Fiennes’ performance is one for the ages.

The previous film posited that although Britain had been ravaged by the rage virus, mainland Europe hadn’t and it’d continued to develop as it actually did in the 21^st century. This scenario of an isolated and seriously in-the-shit Britain was an obvious metaphor for Brexit. The Bone Temple is less on the nose with state-of-the-nation metaphors, but you can still see some.

The kids making up Sir Jimmy’s gang – and they are kids, as evidenced by scenes where a couple of them suffer fatal injuries and reveal their true, frightened selves during their death throes, one of them even lamenting about a long-ago pet kitten – symbolize the victims of a half-century of ruthless government policies that decreed there had to be winners and losers and split the country into haves and have-nots. They’re the losers, the have-nots, the left-behind youngsters condemned to membership of a feral underclass. Tellingly, the opening scene shows the Jimmies gathered in a decayed public swimming pool in some abandoned post-industrial city: the sort of public amenity, in the sort of place that desperately needed public amenities, that got the chop during David Cameron’s premiership and ‘austerity’ project in the early 2010s.

Significantly, they’re exploited, manipulated and fashioned into a squad of killers by someone modelling himself on Jimmy Savile. The real Savile was a respected member of the establishment at the time when British politics turned callous and abandoned the principle that all citizens, including the weak, poor and vulnerable, should be looked after. Each Christmas-time in the 1980s, for instance, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would invite him to spend Boxing Day with her at Chequers. He was also a confidante of Prince (now King) Charles.

If Sir Jimmy and his minions represent everything rotten about Britain recently, Kelson represents the opposite. For one thing, he was formerly a doctor in the country’s National Health Service, an institution founded on the principle that the weak, poor and vulnerable should be looked after (and not have to pay a fortune for their treatment). When he treats the arrow wounds that a doped-up Samson has incurred during his travels, he quips, “So you owe me… Only kidding. I’m NHS, free of charge.” Another British cultural reference that may go over the heads of American audiences.

Kelson also reminds us that as well as being an imperial superpower, Britain was once a more benevolent, cultural one. (It helps that he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, a fixture in two massive, British-originating cultural franchises, Harry Potter and James Bond.) Despite the apocalypse, Kelson has managed to hang onto his old vinyl collection and he plays stuff from it at appropriate moments – Duran Duran’s Ordinary World (1992) when Samson needs some pacification; Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place (2000) when he’s wistfully contemplating the night-sky; and fabulously, when he has to deal with the Jimmies, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (1982) – “Let’s turn this up to 11,” he says, and he does. Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Duran Duran… In their different ways, at different times, these British bands were massively popular, musical juggernauts worldwide (and coincidentally, all three have been touring again lately). That’s the sort of global soft power Britain should be proud of.

Indeed, Kelson seems an embodiment of the caring and creative British values that the country tried to project to the outside world during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics – a ceremony whose artistic director was Danny Boyle.

Aside from the script, performances, themes and general execution, a reason why I liked The Bone Temple so much was because the relationship between Kelson and Samson echoed something in one of my all-time favourite horror movies, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985). In the Romero film, a scientist called Dr Logan (Richard Liberty) attempts to ‘domesticate’ a zombie nicknamed ‘Bub’ (Sherman Howard). Good though Chi Lewis-Parry is, Samson doesn’t quite have the pathos of Bub – it would be difficult, since at the start of The Bone Temple we see Samson doing business as usual, i.e., ripping off someone’s head and dragging their spine out of their neck-stump. Kelson, though, is a far more endearing character than the obsessed and unbalanced Logan. The scenes with him and an ever-more docile Samson are both amusing and touching and you feel increasingly worried about them both as the Jimmies close in.

If I have a criticism of The Bone Temple, it’s about how it depicts the other infected, the ones who aren’t Samson. They feel like a device that gets turned on and off according to the needs of the plot. Uninfected humans out in the open who need to be threatened? The infected are ubiquitous. Uninfected humans out in the open who need to have a chat by the campfire? The infected are nowhere to be seen. Also, near the end, I can’t understand why the infected don’t immediately swarm the bone temple when it’s lit up like a chandelier and blasting out Iron Maiden.

Otherwise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a hugely impressive achievement by Nia DaCosta, Alex Garland and their cast and crew. And while Ralph Fiennes won’t win an Oscar for his performance, much as he deserves to – zombie movies don’t win Oscars – Iron Maiden should at least get him onstage during the rest of their world tour.