Insanity and terror lay waste to a quiet Midwestern town as a biological weapon gone awry ravages it’s inhabitants and threatens to decimate the planet. If you only see one horror flick remake this year, this is the one to see.
Ogden Marsh, population 1,206, is experiencing some serious trouble with the townsfolk. A biological weapon developed by the military has accidentally contaminated the water supply and the affected citizens develop a murderous thirst but not for brains, just mayhem. The military immediately initiates a containment protocol in order to stop the dangerous weapon from spreading and soon the town sheriff and a small band of the unaffected find themselves in a battle for their survival against the government troops as well as “the crazies.”
Director Breck Eisner’s extremely well crafted remake of the 1973 horror schlock film The Crazies (George A. Romero) triumphs where so many of its counterparts fail. From the very first strains of a lolling Hank Williams song strummed over the opening shots of the picturesque, small-town landscape of Ogden Marsh, Iowa we can smell the new cut grass on the playing fields and are lulled into the sweetly deceptive security of Midwestern small-town existence.
No sooner have you settled into this Norman Rockwell painting than you are jarred out of your seat with an intensely disturbing scene that takes place in front of the entire town under the lights of the high school baseball field, and serves as a reminder of just how fragile American pastoral life can be. The things we treasure and take for granted after all, can be taken away in a heartbeat.
The Crazies is the missing chunk that I Am Legend let fall to the cutting room floor. Both films center on biological research gone awry but Legend jumps immediately from the onset of the outbreak to a devastated world many years later. The beauty of Crazies is that it takes you through the entire nail-biting, white-knuckle process of watching the town become engulfed in bloodthirsty insanity as the virus spreads.
The brilliance of the much-improved script is that it catapults the audience directly from the establishing scenes into the action and plunges the audience into the plot without a chance to catch their breath. Its spine-tingling suspense and lack of predictability remind you of why the horror genre became popular in the first place. Far from being one dimensional, the script explores the moral dilemmas faced by the military as well as the besieged townsfolk.
The Crazies has a winning formula of a capable storyteller in Eisner and a big budget that is rarely seen in the horror genre. An added bonus is that it is pleasantly devoid of any big names slumming in a horror film. With believable, well-fleshed out characters and dialogue that is incredibly organic and absent (mostly) of the genres stereotypically cliche one-liners, this film delivers all the chills and thrills, with none of the eye-rolling groans.
Timothy Olyphant as Sherriff David Dutton, Joe Anderson (his deputy) and Radha Mitchell who plays Dutton’s wife all deliver compelling and truly believable performances. Their characters are made all the more watchable by refusing to enter basements alone, “split up to find a way out of here,” or crawl backwards on the ground away from a psychopath wielding a shovel. In other words, they behave exactly like a real person would in this set of circumstances, rather than a bunch of idiots begging to catch an axe in the face.
The depth of the characters and the intelligence of the choices they make allow the audience to relate to them much more easily than say, a half-naked twit that keeps dropping the car keys as the murderer approaches. This film will definitely strike a chord with a post Sept. 11 America, now totally paranoid about emergency preparedness, and usher in an era of shotgun ownership not seen since the American Revolution. Viva La Horror.