It was about 9pm one evening when I got an e-mail from one of my contacts at Fox Atomic letting me know that they were setting up set visits for both 28 Weeks Later and The Hills Have Eyes 2. Now, I’ve been doing this website thing for a long time, and up until that e-mail the only set I’d been on was the very badass Wrong Turn 2 (which you can read about here).
To say I was cautious would be an understatement. The trip was planned for the same week my mom was supposed to come for a visit, and it took a lot of discussion with my lovely wife, who I should point out was way beyond encouraging, to convince me to give it a go. What a fool I was for even questioning it for a second.
To say that my trip to London, England for 28 Weeks and Ouarzazate, Morocco for Hills 2 was “epic” is an understatement. Not only did the locations rock, but the team I was with while I was there (namely Axelle Carolyn from Fangoria, who was only with us on the Weeks set, Scott Weinberg from JoBlo, Joe Hui from Bloody Disgusting, Steve Horn from IGN, and Daniel Ward from Movies Online) were the nicest group of geeks you could want to hang with, and we all got along really well.
Since this is just a preview piece, I can barely tell you anything about what actually happened on the sets, but I can say that Fox Atomic was fantastic to us from Day One of the trip all the way through to Day Seven. Their rep, Eric Lieb, was more than just one of us; if nothing else he was an even bigger geek than the rest of us, the difference being that he got to see the movies being made behind the scenes as opposed to just writing about them. We could not have asked for a better “suit” to accompany us in our journeys, that’s for sure!
What I can tell you about the sets is that both look equally amazing (though I think 28 Weeks will be better, an opinion that has nothing to do with me actually being in it briefly), and everyone we talked to was very happy to be getting their hands dirty in our genre. It was a bit disconcerting for me when I heard they had hired two relatively unknown (at least in the US) directors for the sequels, but both men are passionate about what they’re doing and have assembled like-minded crews to make sure that neither film suffers from sequelitis, a horrible condition that taints the memory of a first film by crafting a terrible follow-up (see Ghostbusters 2 for an example).
I should stop now as I don’t want to give too much away in my ramblings. Today is the day you need to head over to Fox Atomic’s site for all sorts of rotting goodies form both films, including the first footage from them and previews of their upcoming graphic novel tie-ins, plus a ton more.
I’ll have full set reports for both films as we inch closer to their respective release dates (March 2nd for Hills 2 and May 11th for 28 Weeks, so don’t even think about going anywhere before then!
– Johnny Butane
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