28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

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I Am Legend (1999)

The virus in the 1971 Charlton Heston film adaptation of Richard Matheson's book turned people into eloquent cloaked albinos about as terrifying as the "Street Countdown" participants of that IT Crowd episode, so this much more recent adaptation is already winning by featuring truly terrifying monsters, the Darkseekers, whose cgi may be wonky but whose rapidly increasing intelligence really does pose a problem to Robert Neville, the last-man-on-Earth immune to the virus and humanity's last chance at a comeback, played by Will Smith, looking as good as he ever has and with a bottom lip that should have won an Oscar for its role in this post-apocalyptic scifi blockbuster.

★★★☆☆

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The Omega Man (1971)

Germ warfare in a Sino-Russian war turns everyone into Paul Bettany's character in The Da Vinci Code and it is up to an often shirtless Charlton Heston, the only person in the world not yet an eloquent albino with problematic life philosophies, to find a cure before this unrewarding scifi thriller, in which nothing much actually happens, ends up even longer than it already is.

★★☆☆☆

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Contagion (2011)

In Deep Impact, another global panic disaster movie with an all-star cast, it is a meteor hurtling towards Earth that, threatening human extinction, leads the world's population to act in extraordinary ways (including holding a lottery for a limited number of life-preserving prizes), but here in Contagion, it is a new strain of virus - something like the coronavirus - that wipes out millions, starts a global panic, and launches the scientific race to find a vaccine, and even though we've seen it all before in Deep Impact and Outbreak and others, it is gripping stuff ripped from today's newspaper headlines.

★★★★☆

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