The Crazies (2010)

2010

Directed by Breck Eisner
Starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson and Danielle Panabaker

This week's RemakeUAry review comes with a bit of an asterisk.  The reason?  I didn't even know this movie was a remake until after I watched it!  I remember seeing the ads for this flick when it came out in the early parts of 2010, thinking that it looked all kinds of badass, being excited for opening night, getting out of the theater, logging on to IMDB and finding out that it's based on a George Romero movie.  Now it all makes sense.  There's just a type of story that has that "Romero glow," kind of like the "Spielberg glow" that Joe Bob Briggs used to talk about on MonsterVision.  Only this glow is deciddly less glowy and much more depressing.  Wait, what?

First things first: I think this is a good film.  Not great, but good, and definitely worthy of the praise it got upon release.  And let me tell you something (brother), that is some high praise coming from me, because it goes against the grain of my zombie movie bias.  The Crazies might not  be an actual zombie movie per se, but it definitely shares some of the conventions of the genre.  Occasionally, it also devolves into some of the cliches that plague this not-so-little subgenre of horror.  Fortunately, there's enough twists on the usual flesh-eating conventions to redeem it, along with more than a few sequences that generate actual tension.  I say this is as someone with absolutely no biases when it comes to the source material, either, since...well, I haven't seen the original film and have no plan to.  With that, let's get to the blow-by-blow.

Welcome to the fictional town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, a state located a mere stone's throw away from yours truly and the land of some horrifically large STOP signs.  Seriously.  The town is set up to be representative of an idyllic little Midwestern town, something that I DO hold very near and dear to my heart, so the movie has +2 points going for it from the jump.  We meet our main protagonist, Sheriff David Dutten, played by Timothy Olyphant in a rare babyface role.  I'm so used to seeing this guy play weasely dickheads that seeing him here was admittedly kind of jarring, but the guy does a decent-enough job coming off as a relatable small-town cop that his resume of villain roles almost vanish from your mind.  His wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) is unfortunately not quite as cool, the local doctor who spends much of the movie with a pained expression on her face somewhat reminiscent of the heroine from The Screaming Skull.  Google it, kids.

The movie starts off with a bang, literally, and an opening bit that definitely qualifies as memorable.  Sheriff David is at a local baseball game when one of the residents of the town shows up in the outfield brandishing a shotgun and looking very, very sweaty.  In a horror movie, you know this means bad news.  The scene ends with the shotgun-wielding dude dead and a mystery about why this came to be, and it doesn't take long for several like-styled incidents to take place across Ogden Marsh.  These bits were definitely the highlight of the movie - as David and Judy make their way through the story, they periodically come across some more zombie residents and increasingly bigger, more violent set pieces.  Sometimes resulting in the death of one of their side character companions.

I've noticed in the last ten years or so that the frequency of a side character who steals the show is becoming a pretty common thing.  The Crazies belongs to one particular character, and that would be Russell Clank.  Russell is David's right-hand man and deputy, much more trigger-happy than his boss, and you get the impression that Joe Anderson really loved playing this role.  Enthusiasm like that is infectious in movies, especially ones that take themselves as seriously as this one does.  Unfortunately, the other main side character is played by Danielle Panabaker.  I've seen her in a few movies, and she's always just kind of makes me go "yeah, this person sure does exist."  Not an especially good actress, not especially charismatic, not especially attractive, just average at everything.  Fortunately, she's also the first big character to die.  Spoiler alert.

Of course, at some point we have to put everything together as to what is causing everyone in town to become so violent and look like extras from a very different type of George Romero film.  The answer is that a downed military airplane deposited its "Trixie" virus biological weapon into the town's water supply...and, well, there's your answer.  As the movie goes on, the action gets decidedly bleaker, with a chess match going on between not only our main group of characters and the mad humans but also our main group of characters and a trained government hit squad.  'Cus it's not a movie like this without some scummy military operatives.  Fortunately, we care enough about Olyphant, Anderson and even Radha Mitchell by this point that it actually has some emotional weight, to the point that when the expectedly depressing ending arrives, it managed to not piss me off too much.  A little, but not too much.  It was at least 37% cooler than The Tommyknockers.

As previously mentioned, I've never seen the original film that this one is based on.  But one thing that I CAN gleam for comparison's sake is how this movie feels compared to all of the other remakes that were popping up around this time.  In that regard, The Crazies really shines.  The reason?  Very unlike the Platinum Dunes movies, you can tell that everyone involved in this movie from director Breck Eisner to the screenwriters to the actors took this movie deadly serious.  Sitting in the theater that night, I remember this feeling extremely refreshing after sitting through all of the stuff that Michael Bay and his cronies had unleashed upon the world in recent years.  The powers-that-be here were trying their damndest to make a badass film, and it shows.

That doesn't exactly translate into scares.  I didn't find The Crazies to be an especially scary movie.  It's got some cool setups and payoffs to its admittedly kind of weary alternate take on a zombie movie premise, but scary?  Not at all.  Having said that, it DOES stick with you after the ending credits roll and make you think about what just happened, just like the O.G. 1978 [i]Dawn of the Dead[/i] did all those years ago.  Call it the Lick Ness Monster Romero Love-Hate Symplex, which I just realized kind of sounds like a sexually-transmitted disease.

Rating time.  *** out of ****.  For the record, that's the highest-rating so far in the New Year's RemakeUAry, mostly because this one actually tries to be a film and not just a cash grab!