Review: The Crazies
Posted by Trista DeVries on February 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment
When I first heard that they were remaking The Crazies, I was pretty wary. Did we really need another crappy remake of a pretty solid 70s horror movie, let alone one by the legendary George A Romero himself? So I sat, with skeptic’s eyes and watched the latest 90-minute reboot of one of my favorite horror classics — and I was not disappointed. Formulaic at times and with much of its political message ripped out, it still remains one of the more solid genre offerings to emerge in recent memory. To use the technical term, it was awesome.
The Crazies opens with a devastated wasteland of a town. There are fires everywhere, burning cars and smashed shop windows. This was the town of Ogden Marsh. The narrative takes us back two days to a baseball game where we meet David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), the town’s Sheriff. The former town drunk walks onto the pitch holding a shotgun and attempts to shoot Sheriff Dutton when he tries to talk some sense to the man. As things in the town start to go from odd to strange to crazy (pun intended) Sheriff Dutton tries to get himself and his pregnant physician wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), out of town before things turn to insane. That’s about when the army shows up and starts to take things into their own hands, which is, well, never good. Sheriff Dutton, Judy and his Deputy, Russell, try to get to the truck stop on the highway across town in a vain attempt to save themselves from The Crazies.
As noted, the film is pretty predictable, but it’s predictable in a good way. It uses a lot of the same scare set-ups, camera angles and music that you’re used to seeing in survival horror of this nature, and that’s what’s so great about it. So much of horror these days is trying something “new”, “edgy” and “interesting” that it’s actually refreshing to see a director who went back to the proven formulas that make horror so great to watch. In a way, it lets the viewer relax into the story and simply enjoy the ride. Instead of going for flash and splatter, director Breck Eisner focuses instead on the characters in his story. The character development Eisner has managed to get out of a reasonably standard script is where he gets his audience buy-in, rather than cheap scares. Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell — who is becoming a very solid horror regular — create a couple that seems realistic in a wholly unrealistic environment.
The one thing that was largely, though not entirely, missing from the film was its political message. Romero has a gift for using a completely unrealistic and implausible situation to show us our true natures. It is often said that you don’t truly know what someone is made of until you see them in a crisis, and George Romero went out of his way to show us how true that is. Romero’s early movies showed us that in a major crisis individuals will do anything to save themselves, often becoming debauched along the way. This isn’t to say that a message was absent from the film, but it was laid off on the more stereotypical small town characters. The military message was significantly minimized although, to be fair, the over-militarization of North America has really been a little over done of late, so I can see why it was left out. Instead the film focused on our internal brutality, a hatred of one another just bubbling below the surface, which manifests itself differently in every person. It’s not revolutionary, but it didn’t have to be. It fit with the overall picture.
It interests me to see that Eisner has been reportedly tapped to direct the remake of The Brood, the 1979 David Cronenberg classic tale of creepy children in snowsuits who murder anyone who ticks off their mommy. Frankly, after seeing this film I can think of no one better to direct it. He’s also in the beginning stages of a Flash Gordon reboot and since he directed one of my favorite movies, Sahara, the man clearly has a range that’s worth keeping an eye on.
The Crazies is a pretty tame but pretty awesome horror flick that you should definitely go see with your favorite horror geek, a date or just for a good, solid scare or two.
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