"Gentlemen, we lost a plane. What do you want me to say?" is the casual response by an army upper-up, played by Glenn Morshower in a cameo, when asked about the military's role in turning the peaceful farming town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa into the mouth of hell itself.
Folks, in the event that your friends and neighbors devolve into deranged killers because of a poisoned water supply and the United States Army deploy soldiers to help your small town get through the crisis, it is imperative that you do not trust them and make your own escape.
Breck Eisner's The Crazies, a remake of a 1973 George Romero film of the same name, takes the premise and anti-military sentiment of the original, but creates a slicker, tighter, faster-paced movie out of it. It's what horror remakes do, right?
The original comments on the bungled, borderline evil political and militaristic response to a domestic disaster (Romero, you old hippie) from the perpetrator's point-of-view while showing how ordinary people are caught in the crossfire. The remake is an incessant thriller that strictly follows a band of four—Sheriff Timothy Olyphant, his pregnant wife Doctor Radha Mitchell, Deputy Joe Anderson and teenager Danielle Panabaker—as they make their way out of a town under siege from both sides. It's almost a road movie in execution: cutting through farm fields and highways to finish-line salvation, with hopped-up townsmen and antagonistic soldiers in gas masks to maneuver around. Sounds like it would make a better table-top game than a movie, but let's put the yahtzee cup down for now.
For all their drooling snarls, demonic yellow eyes and bulging veins, the so-called "Crazies" are pretty boring threats. That's the problem when your horror movie's ghouls are generic killing machines. I can't help but feel that the zombie-like appearance is a fatal misstep on the filmmakers' part, as it makes the Crazies not only easily identifiable (thus robbing the movie of some good old confusion paranoia) but also discernibly supernatural, which goes against the premise of ordinary-people-gone-mad. Why are they even called Crazies if they're just across the board homicidal? In Romero's original, the epidemic results in different behaviors. We have memorable scenes like a father trying to rape his own daughter and the town priest setting himself on fire. See, that's definitely crazy.
People is what's really scary, not a loose virus. What would have been truly horrific is if people have gone rabid, but some of them without needing outside influence, which you'd think would be a logical development for the story to touch on. The premise, and even the title, virtually demand to be about the human capacity to do terrible things once given the excuse. The Vietnam War-informed original obviously understands this. I think the remake does too, because the second act has twinges of that—held up by surprisingly terrific performances from the cast, particularly Joe Anderson—as already demonstrated by the trigger-happy soldiers, but it's too meek to really show it. Not when you can just rinse-repeat loud noises to jolt the viewers.
The best sequence in the film sees our "normals" trapped in an automatic car wash. With all the soap and brushes blocking the car windows, they can only hopelessly sit and wait to see if there are anything lurking around the car. It sounds very silly, but they pulled it off very convincingly. This is what a good horror movie should do: making the mundane places seem frightening.
Eisner is evidently not much of a creative scaremonger, though; every scare tactic in the film, effective as they are, is used at least twice. Both the kick-off (the townspeople start going cuckoo) and the send-off (a last-ditch rush outta dodge) are immensely frustrating in their hide-and-seek stupidity, particularly after a strong second act that picks up the pace considerably. There's only so many times you can have a character in hiding grabbed from behind only to reveal that it's just a friend. People in horror movies need to stop grabbing their friends from behind. It's a very inappropriate way to say "Hey."
As the film roars into its predictable conclusion, there's an impending bleakness to the end that leaves me wondering what, if any, is the point of the film. It just chugs along without any lasting impression—the relationships between characters already resolved before they even begin. It's just all too easy, which is why it has to keep repeating itself.
The Crazies keeps a steady groove, but in keeping with the film's philosophy, even as it touches on so many great ideas evoking thought-provoking stuff like environmental poisoning, military accountability, chemical warfare and ethical balance, the thing that sticks out most from the film is the most universal moral of all: always drink bottled, never tap.
"The Crazies" opens February 26, 2010 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Breck Eisner. Written by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright. Starring Danielle Panabaker, Joe Anderson, Radha Mitchell, Timothy Olyphant.
