28 Years Later: The Bone Temple 4K (2026)

“Essential for Horror Fans”

Following its release in UK cinemas in January, Nia DaCosta’s direct sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 YEARS LATER (2025) is now getting a 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD disc release from Sony. When DaCosta was initially announced as director concerns were expressed in some quarters that she might not be able to successful follow Boyle’s combination of horror and satire tinged with outright comedy. However it’s a delight to report that, if anything, THE BONE TEMPLE contains even more extreme horrors than its predecessor while skimping not a jot on the heavy dose of satire in returning screenwriter Alex Garland’s script.

Starting pretty much immediately where the previous film left off, we join young Spike (Alfie Williams) having been rescued by the ‘Cult of Jimmy’ and about to fight for his place among the followers of the group's cruel and (literally as we find out later) psychotic leader ‘Sir Jimmy Crystal’ (a mesmerisingly disturbing performance by Jack O’Connell). 

Meanwhile Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) the builder of the bone temple, is making inroads, DAY OF THE DEAD-style, into communicating with the infected, specifically a large brutal individual called Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) who he is able to control with large doses of morphine. But the world of the doctor and the world of Jimmy Crystal are about to meet, resulting in a climax in which not everyone will make it out alive.

Nia DaCosta’s 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE is for everyone who thought Danny Boyle’s 28 YEARS LATER was way too lighthearted, coming across as it does like an extra grim episode of Terry Nation’s frequently exceedingly grim 1970s TV series Survivors. The emphasis here is on the insanity of many of the uninfected human characters, and it fully justifies the 18 rating it has been given by the BBFC with some wincingly effective torture scenes.

DaCosta also manages a few really stylish touches that show her effective CANDYMAN (2021) was no fluke. The sound editing deserves a shout out, too. Watch this with a good surround sound system and you’ll be convinced zombies are creeping up behind you. An essential film for fans of modern horror and an excellent entry in what is shaping up to be the best satirical horror film series of the 2020s. 

        Sony's 4K disc release includes an excellent commentary track by DaCosta who easily conveys the enthusiasm she obviously still has for the project. This is backed up by the 17 minutes of making of featurettes we also get in which she is interviewed along with Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and others. There's a three minute blooper reel which is more people acting silly rather than making actual mistakes, and a one minute deleted scene.  

Nia DaCosta’s 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE is out now to buy on DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD and 4K UHD Steelbook

We Bury the Dead (2025)

Signature Entertainment are releasing writer-director Zak Hilditch's latest post-apocalyptic drama (he made the emotional endurance test that was 2013's THESE FINAL HOURS) on Digital, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow. The apocalypse in question is rather more low-key this time around and those who have seen THESE FINAL HOURS will probably be relieved to hear WE BURY THE DEAD isn't quite the hammer blow to the senses that Mr Hilditch's previous genre effort was.

America makes a terrible mistake (likely to be a recurring theme in cinema for the next few years) and a pulse bomb is let off by accident, killing everyone on the Australian island state of Tasmania. There's no radiation pollution so once the fires have settled down teams of volunteers are sent in to clear up the dead. Before they do so, however, they are warned by the military that some of the victims are waking up and aren't at all like they were.

Ava (Daisy Ridley), an American, comes over as part of the volunteer corps with the intention of looking for her husband who was at a convention in Hobart. She teams up with Clay (Brendon Thwaites) and together they make their way south into territory that is yet to be cleared by the authorities as safe to enter.

Whereas THESE FINAL HOURS was an unflinching, brutally cynical under-the-microscope examination of humankind faced with certain death after a worldwide disaster, WE BURY THE DEAD comes across more like one of zombie genre progenitor George A Romero's more thoughtful, equally concerned movies like THE CRAZIES (1973). Once our civilians are clearing up bodies it becomes clear that the military can't be trusted and neither, necessarily, is Ava who is harbouring her own secrets.

There are zombies, but only very seldom are they encountered so anyone expecting an undead gorefest will be disappointed. Once Ridley and Thwaites are on the road the film suffers from slowing the action down a bit too much when it should perhaps be developing into more of a road movie, but for a low-key, restrained piece this isn't bad at all. Here's the trailer:

Zak Hilditch's WE BURY THE DEAD is out from Signature Entertainment on Digital  HD on Monday 2nd February 2026 and Blu-ray and DVD on Monday 16th February 2026

The Return of the Living Dead 4K (1985)

 

One of the best zombie movies of all time is getting a 4K release from Arrow Films in both UHD and Blu-ray editions, with two discs in each set.

In the years running up to the release of both RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and George A Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD (also 1985) the movie press had been full of speculation about how Romero and his NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD co-writer John Russo would separately take  things forward, as the two of them had both retained the legal right to make sequels to the 1969 film. A 'tie-in' paperback, written by Russo, had even hit US and UK bookshops with mention that 'A sequel film will be released soon' on the cover, even though the plot of the eventual RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD movie bore little relation to it.

Full credit, then, to writer-director Dan O'Bannon who solved the tricky legal problem of 'How do you do a sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD without it feeling it could be in the same universe as DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)?'. He did it very cleverly, too, slyly suggesting, with a twinkle in his eye that RETURN was set in the 'real' world and giving the film a punky, bouncy aesthetic that felt very different to Romero's sequels but somehow also managed to squeeze a little bit of satire in amongst all the fun. 

Arrow's 4K transfer looks far more vivid than any previous version, but if you are an ROTLD obsessive be warned that the music track Deadbeat Dance by The Damned is still removed due to rights issues. Obsessives will also want to know that the tarman's voice is still the redubbed version, as is the voice of the confederate soldier who asks them to 'send more cops'. Also, a curious music edit sees Roky Erikson's Burn the Flames cutting out much earlier than in previous versions so you are just left with Frank's unaccompanied scream. 

        Extras include four commentary tracks ported over from the previous Shout Factory release - Dan O'Bannon and production designer William Stout; Stout and the cast; actors Thom Mathews and John Philbin with FX artist Tony Gardner; and a fan track by Gary Smart and Chris Griffiths.

Other extras are essentially archival from the Shout Factory double disc Blu-ray set from 2016, including an interview with Russo (15 minutes), a featurette on the effects (33 minutes), a making of (21 minutes), location tour (10 minutes), designing the dead (14 minutes), a piece about 1980s horror classics (24 minutes) and a featurette on the film's soundtrack (30 minutes). Talking of the soundtrack, why has nobody interviewed (or even mentioned) British composer Francis Haines who provides the memorable main title music ('The Trioxin Theme')? This is a man who has done everything from SPLIT SECOND to CBeebies, and the story behind The Trioxin Theme itself is surely worthy of a featurette, originating as it did from a Dungeons and Dragons cassette tape ('The First Quest') that was then revamped for the movie.

Arrow's set comes with a second Blu-ray disc in both editions featuring the two hour long documentary More Brains which tells you all you need to know about the film (apart from what I've mentioned above about the soundtrack). This disc also comes with Dan O'Bannon's final interview (29 minutes), 15 minutes of deleted scenes from the documentary, a 10 minute location tour and ROTLD in 3 minutes from the interviewed cast members. The set comes with a reversible sleeve (no Graham Humphreys artwork, by the way) double sided poster and a booklet with new writing on the film.

Dan O'Bannon's THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is out from Arrow on 4K in a two disc set (either UHD and Blu-ray or two Blu-rays) on Monday 13th October 2025

Rippy (2024)

Director Ryan Coonan's RIPPY, about a zombie kangaroo on the rampage in a small and remote Australian town, is getting a Digital and DVD release from Altitude Films.

Now, you're probably thinking that with that sort of subject matter you might just be in for something laugh a minute, perhaps even a spoof of not just creature features but Australian exploitation cinema as a whole.

But no. Sadly, RIPPY isn't like that at all.

RIPPY is played dead (sorry) serious throughout, so much so that you get the feeling the movie started off as a sober subject about a killer animal run wild, and then someone had the bright idea in post-production that it would be much improved if the threat was, instead, a CGI zombie kangaroo.

That would certainly explain why we don't see the creature for a lot of the running time, except in occasional brief close ups. Instead we get the story of small town sheriff Maddie (Tess Haubrich) who is approached one morning by slightly mad Schmitty (Michael Biehn who, it must be said, still has it) who is convinced he shot a creature on his property that then refused to die. 

Meanwhile bodies are starting to pile up, with post mortem findings (some nice gore effects here) suggesting the bodies were bitten and torn rather than injured with a weapon. It's not long before an expedition into the wilderness is mounted, with the inevitable showdown taking place once we're back in town.

RIPPY boasts some gorgeous locations and the acting is absolutely fine. However it could do with quite a bit more monster action and rather fewer lengthy dialogue sequences. Still, at just over 80 minutes it makes for brief undemanding entertainment that could easily have ended up as a Frightfest midnight movie. Here's the trailer:

RIPPY is out from Altitude Films on Digital on Monday 30th December 2024 and DVD on Monday 13th January 2025

I Walked With a Zombie and The Seventh Victim (1943)

"Two Classic Lewtons get the 4K Treatment"

Bravo to Criterion, who are releasing two of the best films producer Val Lewton made for RKO in the 1940s on 4K UHD and Blu-ray.

Jacques Tourneur's (heavily Jane Eyre inspired) I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE is the story of a nurse, Betsy (Frances Dee) who takes a position on a Caribbean island looking after Jessica (Christine Gordon) the near-catatonic wife of Paul (Tom Conway). Apparently Jessica got that way after contracting a severe illness that affected her spinal cord, but the song Sir Lancelot (a mainstay of 1940s and 1950s movies) sings suggests more is going on. 

Falling in love with Paul and determined to help him at any cost, Betsy determines to cure Jessica with voodoo, and the result is one of the film's highlights - a midnight trek through the cane fields, including a confrontation with the zombiefied Carrefour (the iconic Darby Jones). 

Whereas many horror films of this period build to an often fiery climax, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE's strength lies more in the subtleties along the way, the character interplay and the dialogue, rather than in its ending, which is measured and sombre rather than a confrontation between 'good' and 'evil'. Tourneur's careful direction and the screenplay from Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray are all of a much higher quality than was probably required or expected by RKO, and the result is a classic you can show your non-horror loving friends to show how thoughtful and carefully put together classic genre cinema can be.

In THE SEVENTH VICTIM, Mary (a young Kim Hunter) learns that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has disappeared. Her attempts to find her lead to the discovery of the Palladists, a group of Satan worshippers, whom Jacqueline has betrayed and whom they now want dead. However the group has forsaken violence and so their intended victim (Jacqueline will be the seventh) has to kill themselves.

Some superbly atmospheric sequences help to paper over a screenplay that does feel a bit cobbled together, complete with an ending that must have left 1940s audiences open mouthed, and not in a good way. Lewton's films were always the antithesis of Universal's mid 1940s lumbering monster rallies, and while THE SEVENTH VICTIM is indeed haunting and ultimately desperately sad, it leaves too many important questions unanswered to be entirely satisfactory. That said, there's much to enjoy here, from the subway scene (did it influence de Palma?) to the numerology - there are plenty of instances of the number seven, or multiples thereof, and look at how many times the names of the places Mary visits consist of seven letters (an influence on Peter Greenaway's DROWNING BY NUMBERS, perhaps?). And of course there's that climactic scene where Brooks is pursued, perhaps by nothing more than her own anxiety and paranoia. Some think THE SEVENTH VICTIM is Lewton's best, but that's up to you to decide. 

Criterion's 4K transfers are, unsurprisingly, a huge improvement over the old DVDs. Comparing with the 1080p presentation on the Blu-ray there's extra crispness and detail that you would expect from the format, with a good level of grain in the image but the image noticeably clearer on the UHD.

Extras include an archival Stephen Jones & Kim Newman commentary for I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE while Steve Haberman performs similar duties for THE SEVENTH VICTIM (it's also an archival commentary - from the 2005 DVD release). Another alternate audio track on both films gives us excerpts from Adam Roche's eleven-part series about Val Lewton from his classic movie podcast The Secret History of Hollywood. 

Both the two films and the extras above can be found on Criterion's UHD disc. A Blu-ray is included with the UHD disc or it can be purchased separately. It includes all the above, but also: an erudite and well-illustrated talking head piece from film historian Imogen Sara Smith about the two films; the 2005 documentary Shadows in the Dark: the Val Lewton Legacy, which is excellent and it's good to see it resurrected on this set; 12 minutes of excerpts from the PBS series Monstrum about Haiti and zombies; more audio material from Adam Roche about Jean Brooks (53 minutes) and Tom Conway (69 minutes). There are also trailers for both films.

Finally, the set also comes with essays by Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante.

Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE SEVENTH VICTIM are being released on a single disc by Criterion as either Blu-ray only or a UHD / Blu-ray dual format package on Monday 14th October 2024

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

"The Dead Get a UHD Upgrade"

       Oh yes, George A Romero's seminal nihilistic social commentary (that just happens to use flesh-hungry zombies as a major component in its conveyance of allegory) gets a reissue from Criterion in a three disc set - one 4K UHD disc and two Blu-rays.

       With seemingly every 'cult' movie over thirty years old getting either the 2K or 4K scan treatment these days, it's perhaps not surprising that arguably the cultiest of cult horror movies would end up getting a splendid double disc edition eventually. Still, to those of us old enough to still be marvelling at the existence of DVD let alone Blu-ray, the presence of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in such a beautiful transfer and with so many extras really is a cause for celebration.

Is there anyone out there who doesn't know the plot? The recently deceased come back to life and start attacking and eating the living. There's mention of radiation from a returning Venus probe being the cause, but we all know that what sets the dead off doesn't actually matter. What does matter is that George A Romero was (and remains) one of that elite and treasured group of film-makers whose movies were strong on social conscience while still delivering the necessary thrills such that his horror projects, while filled with important and relevant subtext, were never overly preachy. 

Trapped in a farmhouse, a socially disparate group of people fight for survival, but, as is so often the case with Romero's projects, it's the humans who are each other's worst enemies, far more than the shambling threat lurking outside.

Reams and books (and reams of books, if there is such a thing) have been written about NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, so instead I'll just tell you all about Criterion's new package, which consists of one UHD disc and two Blu-rays. The first presents the film in a sparkling 4K transfer with uncompressed monoaural soundtrack. There are two audio commentaries as extras, both recorded in 1994. The first features Romero, co-writer John Russo and actor Karl Hardman, while the second had co-producer Russell Streiner and members of the cast. Also on disc one is the work print edit of the film with the title NIGHT OF ANUBIS accompanied by a six minute introduction from Russell Streiner.

Disc two is the same as disc one but on Blu-ray. Disc three has essentially the same extras as Criterion's 2018 release, which include: Light in the Darkness, a 23 minute piece made in 2017 and features Guillermo del Toro, Frank Darabont and Robert Rodriguez discussing the movie's cinematic importance. There's a never-before-seen 16mm reel of dailies featuring alternate takes not used in the film. Learning from Scratch is a 2017 12 minute talking head piece with John Russo remembers the Latent Image, the company that made the movie. Walking Like the Dead features cast and crew talking about what it was like to be zombies in the film. Tones of Terror is a fascinating piece on the library music that was used in the film. Limitations into Virtues is a new video essay on the style of the film.

There are also a number of archive interviews with Romero and actors Duane Jones and Judith Ridley, trailers, TV and radio spots. These include 20 minutes of edited highlight's from NBC's Tomorrow show, and a 2012 TIFF interview with Romero Also included in the package is a poster of an iconic image from the film, and on the reverse an essay entitled Mere Anarchy is Loosed by critic Stuart Klawans. Like so many of Criterion's releases, this is an essential package for any movie enthusiast's collection. 

George A Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is out in a three-disc UHD and Blu-ray set from Criterion on 

Monday 7th October 2024