I'm in a tiny minority of people who enjoyed the Stallone film as an example of shlock cinema at its finest, without worrying about its manifest deviations from the comics. (With Stallone's looks, you'd have thought he'd be the one star that could keep the helmet on for the entire movie without anyone objecting.) But I would love to see a movie that captured more of the original's satirical edge — perhaps a retelling of the Block Wars saga, or the Judge Caligula storyline — and maybe a Judge Dredd who kicked a bit more ass. I remember the Dredd in the comics as an unstoppable asswipe who totally lacked a sense of humor but would never give up, even when he's crawling on his hands and knees across the radioactive Cursed Earth.

In any case, the good news is, the new film is being made by British company DNA Films, which produced 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, The Last King Of Scotland, The History Boys and Notes On A Scandal. That's a track record that makes me quite a bit more excited about a new Dredd outing, whether it's a remake or a sequel. (My guess? They won't even acknowledge the first film.) Rebellion and 2000 A.D. announced the venture over on the 2000 A.D. forums, where it sparked great excitment.

Is it too soon to start a rumor that Danny Boyle is directing this film? When I talked to him a while back, he seemed eager to do more science fiction films, and the fantastic Slumdog Millionaire has proven that he can succeed at any type of film he sets his mind to. And he's worked with DNA on a few projects before. So even though I made it up and it's purely wishful thinking, I'm declaring it officially a rumor that Danny Boyle is directing Dredd. [2000 A.D. Online via Teaser-Trailer]

Note: We didn't include any directors who haven't worked in the genre this decade. We also left out McG and Brett Ratner. If either of those guys is your favorite director, we're very sorry. Very, very sorry.

On the 28 Days Later sequel:

Says Boyle:

There is an idea for something to do with a way of concluding [the story]. It's not really come to anything yet. It's quite a big idea, but it'll be an economic decision. Because what happens with franchises like that — because it is a franchise now, in effect — is the studios do the math. And they say, 'It will make so much on film, and so much on DVD, and therefore, yes you can have that, or no you can't.' But there is an idea for it — a good idea, I think.

Why he'll never do another space movie after Sunshine:

"It is really tough" to direct a science fiction movie, Boyle says, and space movies are the hardest. "Having made a space movie, I now understand why [so many] directors only ever made one of them. Because it's so difficult to do, to get it right." The big problem is that the audience is so demanding — everything has to look right and be consistent. "And I'm one of them. We're merciless. If you get the detail wrong in a space movie, [the audience says] 'Ohhh, the man ought to floating, there wouldn't be any gravity.' It's pitiless."

"Obviously, I think 28 Days Later is a science fiction movie," Boyle adds. "I don't think I'd make another space movie as such. But a scifi movie, no, absolutely."

He also said it was nice to go shoot a movie in Mumbai after "three years in a studio" making Sunshine. "It's really precise and focused, and you don't get anything for free. Nothing walks in the door, because it can't. Obviously, you're in a sealed hostile environment." You couldn't pick a better contrast from that type of environment than Mumbai, where there are constantly surprises and you often end up getting stuff you never would have expected.

Would he ever direct a big-screen Doctor Who movie?

Okay, I had to ask, even though I knew it was a dorky question. With the BBC finally talking about making a big-screen film of its long-running time-travel soap comedy, would Danny Boyle even consider directing it? Sadly, the answer is no:

I wouldn't do it, and I'll tell you why: My memory of Doctor Who is linked with really naff special effects in the 60s, and I couldn't think of any other way of doing it than that. I mean, I was terrified of the Daleks. I remember being so frightened, [of] the really naff special effects like the early days. I couldn't do it any other way. Russell T. Davies has kind of developed it, and has bridged it into the 21st century. It's brilliant, what he's done. But I could never see it like that. I would be the wrong guy to ask about it. I couldn't transform it, really, in a way. But it's a brilliant show, it's brilliant that they've reinvented it for a new audience. It's a huge hit in that format. I love the fact that Chris Eccleston did it for a season, and this new guy is obviously very good. I wish them well with it. But it wouldn't be for me, no.

My dreams are crushed.

Is Slumdog Millionaire a five-minutes-into-the-future film?

Boyle's new film, Slumdog Millionaire, follows Jamal Malik from his childhood to his amazing winning streak, as an 18-year-old, on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Suspecting that Malik has cheated on the show, the police arrest him and demand to know how he could have known the quiz-show's answers. Based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, the movie uses Malik's explanations of his winning streak as a framing device to narrate Malik's short life to date.

When Annalee and I watched the film last week, we were struck by how much it features an emergent global culture of game shows, reality TV stardom, iphones, and pop music that mashes up Bollywood music with Ska and hip-hop.

I asked Boyle if his film was showing how the present is the future, similar to William Gibson's recent novels. He said that looking at India is like seeing the future of Capitalism, because in order to succeed, capitalist economies have to grow really quickly. And economies like India and China are growing unimaginably fast. "There are as many as 300 million people who are officially middle class now in India, and they are driving this change in taste, in the films they want to watch, the music they want to listen to, the stuff they want to buy... and you can feel it happening in front of you."

Boyle added:

In terms of William Gibson, you also get a glimpse of what cities are going to be like. Because there's no city getting smaller. Every city is expanding. Every city just grows and grows, and gets bigger and more crowded. And India, Mumbai especially, has got that. There are way too many people. It's a very little island, Mumbai, and most of it's mangrove swamp, there's very little land, and there's 20 million people there. There isn't enough water, there certainly isn't enough sanitation, they don't have enough electricty. And most of the time — occasionally, they have these riots — but most of the time they live together. They somehow make it work. Our cities are going to be like that eventually. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but in 50 years' time they're going to be like that.

When will Alien Love Triangle come out on DVD?

I asked Boyle a question about dysfunctional family relationships in his films, and somehow this turned into a discussion of his 2002 cult classic, Alien Love Triangle. Only 30 minutes long, the film stars Kenneth Branagh as a man who invents teleportation. And then he discovers that his wife (Courteney Cox) is really a male alien hiding in a female human's body. To make matters worse, a female alien (Heather Graham) shows up to take Cox back to their home planet. Yeah.

Boyle explained that Alien Love Triangle is his film about family life. "It's apparently a superficial comedy. But what it's really about, it's about the British, and what they will do to protect the apparent perfect family ideal — the lengths they will go to to protect that. I'd love you to see that." At one point, Cox's male alien and Graham's female alien "transform bodies at one point in it... They do this kind of transgressive thing, it's really bizarre. But it's really funny. Once you've seen it, you think about family life."

"Very few people have seen it," he laments, because it's too long to be shown as a short before another film. He hopes the film will come out on DVD one of these days. Miramax owns the rights to it, and it was just shown in a special screening at the smallest movie theater in Wales, which was closing. Originally, the movie was going to come out as a charity DVD, but that hasn't panned out. There's also been talk about including it as an extra on the Slumdog Millionaire DVD.

Talking to MTV, Boyle hinted at the possibility of making a third installment to his 28 franchise. But even he knows it's going to get trickier and trickier to name these post apocalyptic films. Boyle told MTV:

“There’s a bit of discussion going on about it at the moment,” Boyle explained...“I have an idea for it [but] I’ve got to present it and see what people think really because it might be silly really,” he laughed.

Don't be such a tease, Boyle — 28 Years Later! Do it, just commit. It could be brilliant. But there'll be flying cars, right?

[MTV]

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.

What's more insulting is a glance at the list of other entrants on the list, which will soon be boiled down to the nominees:

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• Evan Almighty: seriously, a bunch of CGI animals? Giant waves? We're weeping, on the inside. Doctor Doolittle had some similar effects, from what we remember. We love Steve Carell, but not as Neo Noah.
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• The Bourne Ultimatum: sure Matt Damon kicked some butt, but other than that chase across the rooftops and a car chase or two, the vfx didn't blow our pants off.
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• The Golden Compass: this movie got lost in the wake from the Harry Potter yacht, and the effects looked impressive, and a bit too Narnia-esque.
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• I Am Legend: we'll tip our hat to this one, since those desolate shots of an empty Manhattan are simply gorgeous, and the hordes of infected were pretty scary as well. Especially that shot where they're all huddled together the in dark. Yikes.
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• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: This is what happens when you marry a really shoddy story that's full of holes with a ton of CGI. A mess that looks fake and is ultimate unsatisfying. Like a bowl of wax fruit.
• 
  
• Transformers: decent effects, like the drawn-out Optimus Prime transformation and some of the slow-motion fights, but in the heat of most of these robo-battles, it was hard to tell what was going on. Something we keep hearing about this flick.
• 
  
• 300: We wanted this to capture more of the spirit of the Frank Miller graphic novel, but simply copying scenes from it didn't work. Sure, Gerard Butler was great, but at times this felt a bit goofy. Still, we'll admit the effects were the film, and not badly done.
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Sunshine, while you might not be the Academy's darling, you're certainly ours.

Basically, Harvey would die of asphyxiation. He would quickly get "the bends" because the air in his lungs would be trying to escape, and hypoxemia would result. He wouldn't explode, because his skin is actually strong enough to hold everything together even in vacuum. But he also wouldn't suddenly turn into a freeze-dried popsicle, like he does here. It takes time for your body temperature to equalize with the near-absolute zero of space.

NASA knows a lot about what would happen to unshielded humans in vacuum, because of an accident in 1965 where a poor guy's suit ruptured in a vacuum test. He lost consciousness quickly but was otherwise unharmed. There's also the experience of the poor chimpanzees (PDF) whom scientists exposed to a vacuum back in 1964.

Here is the oxygen room from above.
And here's the oxygen room once Icarus starts getting super-heated from the sun.

There's also a clip of Michelle Yeoh looking lovely and washing carrots in the oxygen room here.

• Danny Boyle chose to make Sunshine instead of the sequel to 28 Days Later, because he's not a custodian, he's an innovator. (Although he's hinted lately he may make 28 Years Later.) Boyle has alternated between science fiction movies and "realistic" films with surreal touches. Trainspotting and Shallow Grave are both set in the real world, but a veil of unreality clings to both of them. (Not just the ceiling baby, but Ewan McGregor's unraveling characters in both films.) Zombie movie 28 Days Latermanages the near-impossible: it actually manages to feel post-apocalyptic without killing off its entire cast in the first half hour. But Sunshine is Boyle's greatest achievement. The story of a small crew on a desperate mission tor reignite the sun, it manages to blend the horror thriller with the trippy cosmic film. But both genres have a steel underpinning of hard science and psychological complexity, and everything feels like it's happening for a real reason. Upcoming project: Boyle's next film is Slumdog Millionaire, about an illiterate kid who tries to become a contestant on a Hindi game show.
• Guillermo Del Toro is best known for the acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, one of the most powerful — and darkest — explorations of escapism ever filmed. But he also made two of the best genetic-engineering thrillers of all time: Blade II and Mimic. (Mimic was originally supposed to be a 30-minute segment in an "anthology" film featuring a segment from Boyle.) Both films feature monsters created by science. In Mimic, a scientist creates a super-insect to destroy cockroaches that are carrying disease. But the super-insect evolves into a giant monster that can assume human form. And in Blade, vampires hack their own genome to create near-invincible creatures. Upcoming projects: Del Toro is filming Hellboy 2. He's also working on 3993, a ghost story about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and At The Mountains Of Madness, an HP Lovecraft adaptation set in Antarctica.

• Charlie Kaufman has only been a writer up to now. But he's managed to create a more consistent vision in his films than most directors. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovitch have a shared set of surreal concerns: characters journey into someone's head and discover, to your horror, that identity is always a first draft. Kaufman's characters are always revising their personal narratives and confronting different versions of themselves, like Kaufman and his twin in Adaptation. It's also worth hunting down the little-known Human Nature (directed by Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry) in which a mad scientist tries to train a mouse to use a salad fork. Upcoming project: Kaufman's directing his first film, Synecdoche, New York, due out next year. (It's about a director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his cast, creating ever-stranger New York stories inside a theater which is a scale model of New York.)
• Kathryn Bigelow. Her best-known science fiction film is 1995's Strange Days, about a former cop who sells bootlegs of people's memories on data discs. And then one of those discs turns out to contain someone's memories of murdering a prostitute. But Bigelow's CV is full of claustrophobic thrillers with weird touches, from 1987's vampire romp Near Dark and 1990's cop drama Point Blank to 2002's K19: The Widowmaker. As with Boyle, even her real-world stories are so unnerving they feel like alternate reality. Upcoming project: Her next film is an Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.

"Deep space, at the edge of the galaxy. The future. A new prisoner arrives on top security prison ship and psychiatric research unit Dante 01. Sole survivor of an encounter with an alien force beyond imagining, Saint Georges is a man possessed by inner demons, caught up in the battle to control the monstrous power within him."

Translation: sounds like your standard "holy crap, we're on the edge of space and sanity, and this alien thing has really screwed us" scenario.

The Weinstein Company has bought the U.S. distribution rights, which hopefully means we'll be seeing it on our shores not too long after the January 2nd premiere in France. While the premise might sound tired, Caro's other films make great eye candy.

Famous names: Danny Boyle, Cillian Murphy, Christopher Eccleston

Crunchy goodness: 5

Life lesson: Sometimes one rogue military unit is worse than a nation of zombies.

Sight you'll never unsee: Cillian Murphy poking out Christopher Eccleston's eyes with his bare hands.

Design breakthrough: Boyle revolutionized the zombie genre by turning the traditional shambling, rotting zombie into a fast-moving menace, making subsequent flicks like the Dawn of the Dead remake twenty times scarier - and parody Sean of the Dead forty times funnier.

28 Days Later Review at Movie Freak