“The Crazies” Review

Filed Under Movies

I went into this one cold, having not seen any trailers or TV commercials. In high school, my buddies and I made it through about five or 10 minutes of the original, George A. Romero-directed version. I had no idea what to expect from the new film. But the reviews seemed surprisingly positive for a film that’s A) a remake, B) a zombie movie and C) directed by the guy whose only other film credit is “Sahara.” So is “The Crazies” one of those rare horror flicks that delivers?

No, it’s a piece of shit.

The film isn’t horrible, but it isn’t good either. Movies that are so very middle-of-the-road are difficult to review because I have a hard time forming an opinion about them one way or the other. As such, I tend rank average or “meh-worthy” films alongside the crap movies I truly hated. I’d never give a two-star review of anything. It’s either a great movie or the filmmakers shouldn’t have even bothered. Home video and cable TV have created a niche market for mediocre films and filmmakers to limp along rather that fade into obscurity. Movie fans, for esoteric reasons I find baffling, will often subject themselves to ho-hum dung heaps when they become available on Netflix or On Demand? Why? Hell if I know. I’m trying to break the habit of seeing virtually everything in an effort to keep up with the zeitgeist. The fact “Cop Out” exists — and that people went to see it at midnight last night! — proves to me that the zeitgeist needs to have some taste bitch-slapped into it.

Even so, I still catch the occasional misfire like “The Crazies” and wonder just what the stink everyone else found to like about it.

In the film, Timothy Olyphant plays Sheriff David, whose last name I don’t think is spoken once in the film. I don’t care enough to look it up on IMDb, so I’m going to call him Sheriff David. At any rate, Sheriff David is a folksy, small-town lawman in Ogden Marsh, IA. He’s married to the local doctor, Mrs. Sheriff David (Radha Mitchell), and manages to find the the time to attend high school baseball games while on duty. Odgen Marsh is one of those sleepy, one stoplight towns that’s so boring, even the town drunk’s been on the wagon for two years now. But when the town drunk stumbles onto the baseball diamond while toting a shotgun, Sheriff David smokes that fool, and the quiet little community slowly becomes unhinged due to some virus that’s gotten into the town’s water supply.

The military — the sort of go-to villain in disaster/horror pictures like these — comes rolling in, and faceless troops in haz-mat suits become the stuff of every Libertarian’s worst nightmares, herding the sick into quarantine zones at the point of a gun. Sheriff David, Mrs. Sheriff David and Sheriff David’s Deputy manage to escape and try to make it to the next town undetected. Mrs. Sheriff David is pregnant, which gives the film a tension-building device called a “ticking clock;” unfortunately, it appears to be a nine-month ticking clock because Radha Mitchell has the body of a yoga instructor in this film. The visual shorthand for establishing a super-skinny woman in a movie is pregnant but doesn’t look it is to have her significant other lovingly place his hand on her stomach during a tender moment.

The zombified “crazies” in the movie pop up every now and then, but it’s never established what they’re deal is. They’re slower and less vicious than the infected in “28 Days Later” and far fewer in number than the ghouls in the “Night of the Living Dead” pictures. That makes them not terribly scary.

There’s exactly one clever kill in the whole movie. It involves a guy with a knife stabbed through his hand grabbing someone by the throat. But for the most part, the crazies die like any normal human by taking a bullet to the torso. Part of the fun of movies like this should be the spectacular levels of carnage. “The Crazies,” though, is fairly unremarkable when it comes to splatter. What a gyp.

Director Breck Eisner, son of former Disney CEO Michael, doesn’t seem like a good fit for the material. The movie is fairly interchangeable with any other recent horror pic with elements borrowed from Zack Snyder’s vastly overrated remake of “Dawn of the Dead” as well as Alexandre Aja’s moderately overrated remake of “Hills Have Eyes.” When you’re aping bits from crummy remakes, you’ve really got to reevaluate your directorial vision. Steal big, is what I’m saying.

I wasn’t crazy about “The Crazies.” Oh, it could’ve been way worse, but it also could’ve been a hell of a lot better. I simply don’t get what other people liked so much about the film. Don’t believe that crazy-talk.

-Brad Lohan

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