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Verdict: These B-movie thrills in post-apocalyptic England would make George Romero proud.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
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"28 Days Later" is a welcome blast of B-movie fresh air from Danny Boyle, best known stateside for the estimable "Trainspotting" and the lamentable "The Beach."

Drawing on George Romero's cult classic "Night of the Living Dead" and writer Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" (inadequately filmed as "The Omega Man"), Boyle has fashioned a fine apocalyptic nightmare that ends on an appropriately ambiguous note.

It starts with an animal rights action gone terribly wrong. The chimpanzees liberated from a British lab are infected with something called the rage virus. Twenty-eight days later, a twentysomething bicycle courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy) comes out of a coma, only to find a deserted hospital and, more chillingly, a deserted London. In a series of surreal scenes, he wanders past a stilled Big Ben, through an eerily empty Trafalgar Square. He also comes across a poignant message board covered with pictures and names of the missing that's all too reminiscent of 9/11.

Jim, however, is not alone. Hordes of the infected roam the streets after dark, looking to kill anyone -- anything? -- they encounter. Luckily, Jim hooks up with a handful of survivors: Selena (Naomie Harris), Mark (Noah Huntley), Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his adolescent daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). A repeated radio message promises safety at a military encampment in the English countryside. Is it a trap, and, if not, can they make it that far?

"28 Days Later" touches on a number of issues -- the fear of plagues like AIDS and SARS, urban paranoia, the survivor mentality. Most intriguingly, the movie suggests parallels between the perilous existence of women (rape, violence) in today's world and that of these few uninfected beings in an apocalyptic future.

The screenwriter is Alex Garland, who collaborated with Boyle on "The Beach," which may explain this movie's occasional brain-dead lapses. But movies like this aren't supposed to be perfectly logical; they're supposed to give you a jolt.

Which "28 Days Later" certainly does. A flat tire in a dark London tunnel is a mini horror movie on its own. First, our guys find themselves ankle-deep in rats, also fleeing the pestilence (think "Nosferatu"). Then we see the growing shadows of the ravening infected as they draw closer (think any given Val Lewton film). Then there's the pressure to get the tire fixed in time, a fixture of hundreds of horror movies in which doors, windows, anything must be locked, chained, boarded up or whatever to keep the Bad Things out.

Boyle borrows the low-budget look of Romero's movies by shooting the picture on digital video. But Romero's zombies lumbered; Boyle's slaverers move like Olympic sprinters, making "28 Days Later" a faster, less stilted film.

Another difference: Romero's actors were, to put it kindly, a little low-budget themselves (again, part of the movie's cheesy appeal). Boyle's cast adds a much-needed human center. The burly, reassuring presence of Gleeson (who appeared in "Gangs of New York" and is in the upcoming "Cold Mountain") makes him a perfect leader/father figure. Murphy and Harris aren't as familiar, but both have looks and talent.

Perhaps the best reason to like "28 Days Later"? In a summer full of vehicular spectacles, the only car chase here is the blood-crazed infected running after a London taxi.