"The Crazies" for You

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 03 March 2010 01:46

Written by Maitland McDonagh / Miss FlickChick

Directed by Breck Eisner
Written by Ray Wright and Scott Kosar, based on the screenplay by George A. Romero and Paul McCollough
Starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker

Often eclipsed by his genre-changing Living Dead movies, George Romero’s 1973 The Crazies, also released as Code Name Trixie, in which a bio-weapon is accidentally unleashed on a small American town, is scary and as timely as it was during the Vietnam. And while the original holds up just fine, this slick variation on a theme proves that a sequel that pales by comparison with original does come along every once in a while.

Welcome to bucolic Ogden Marsh, Iowa, pop. 1260. The countryside is beautiful and the farmland fertile; folks are friendly and the pace of life is comfortably slow. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his deputy, Russell Clank (Joe Anderson), rarely have more on their plate than out-of-season duck hunters, teenage mischief and the occasional drunk-and-disorderly. Dutton's wife, Dr. Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell), is newly pregnant, and everything’s right with the world… until it isn’t.

On the opening day of high-school baseball season, longtime town drunk Rory Hamill (Mike Hickman) walks onto the field with a loaded shotgun; David fails to talk him down and is forced to kill him. The strange thing is that Rory’s wife swears Rory had been sober for two years, and the medical examiner’s report bears out her assertion. So what made Rory recklessly endanger a group of teenagers the same age as his own son?

Judy is faced with her own puzzle: Farm-wife Deardra Farnum (Christie Lynn Smith) has brought her husband, Bill (Brett Rickaby), into the office; something just isn't right with him, she insists. And though Farnum seems physically fine, Judy's nagging feeling that Deardra is right comes back to haunt her when Farnum burns his home to the ground, having first shut Deardra and their son inside. Locked up in the town’s holding cell, Farnum’s not rightness is more apparent by the hour, and David arranges to have him transferred to big-city Cedar Rapids the following day.

But the following day, some local good ol’ boys find a corpse in a nearby swamp, still harnessed to a parachute; David and Russell soon locate his plane — a big, black thing that has "military" written all over it — submerged nearby. What it was carrying is anybody’s guess, but the fact that that no one reported it missing is mighty suspicious, not to mention worrying — the swamp drains directly into Ogden Marsh’s water supply. To top it all off, when David and Russell return to the station they find all connections to the outside world severed: Landlines, cell phones, Internet... all dead. And then all hell breaks loose: Their friends and neighbors become bloodthirsty monsters and a military task force swoops in to contain the ever-worsening situation.

There was no reason to expect The Crazies would be any better than dozens of other amped-up, dumbed-down Hollywood horror remakes; Crazies co-writer Scott Kosar had a hand in the dismal do-overs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and The Amityville Horror (2005); his partner, Ray Wright, helped transform J-horror classic Pulse (2001) into a generic "pretty young people in peril" picture; and of director Breck Eisner’s only other major credit, the dismal action-comedy Sahara (2005), the less said the better.

But The Crazies is scary as hell: The small town setting never feels condescendingly symbolic, the characters are actually characters (Eisner had the advantage of a stronger cast than Romero's) and the escalating tension hinges on the fact that line between abnormal behavior triggered of extreme stress and the warning signs of infection is blurred and constantly shifting. And if the notion of germ-warfare mishaps and government cover-ups is less shocking than it once was, it's because today’s reality bears an unnerving resemblance to yesterday’s paranoid fantasy.

Fans of the original will be pleased by the remake’s subtle call outs to its predecessor, notably a haunting cameo by '70s exploitation favorite Lynn Lowry and a brief mention of the toxin’s code name: "Trixie."

 For more by Maitland McDonagh: MissFlickChick.com

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