THE POST-APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE LATINO MIND MELD

If you've seen Alfonso Cuaron's set-in-the-near-future thriller Children of Men, you'll remember the scene in which Clive Owen and the Girl That Can Save Humankind make their escape from a farmhouse, pursued by radical undergrounders, and jump-start a stalled car just in the nick of time.

And if you've seen Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's set-in-the-near-future thriller 28 Weeks Later..., you'll have noted a similar scene, in which the besieged Anglos, chased by viral maniacs across the desolate cityscape of a zombiefied London, make their escape -- by jump-starting a stalled car just in the nick of time.

And if you've seen 28 Weeks Later..., the dark, beautiful, scary-as-heck followup to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later..., you'll also have noted that an angry troop of human contagion are taken out -- de-limbed, decapitated, de-everythinged -- by the whirring blades of a helicopter, tilted frontward so the rotors become weapons. And if you've seen Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse installment, the zombie pastiche Planet Terror, you'll have observed the very same novel, bloody, use for a whirlibird. Yes, a killer 'copter.

"Of course, I've seen Children of Men. And yes, somebody told me about Planet Terror and the helicopter," says Fresnadillo, the Spanish director of the 28 sequel, on the phone the other day. "It is so funny. Sometimes ideas are in the air. And both are Latinio directors. My god, we are connected! We had an unconscious, imaginary mind meld!"