|
Oh Breck Eisner, you big beautiful bastard. There’s nothing on your limited resume that suggests you could turn out such a tight, suspenseful, no bullshit horror film like The Crazies. An actual horror film, too, with perfect, rhythmic tension as well as startling blasts of violence. Let’s face it: Romero’s original 1973 film was kind of a bore. It wasn’t his fault. He did the best he could with a limited budget, and he was hewing an American horror industry with his bare hands. But, like Zack Snyder, you took a dated horror icon and stuffed it full of Berserker jizz and let it loose on an unsuspecting public. You are hereby invited to my next birthday party.
Ogden Marsh is a small town in Iowa, most famous for sharing a cornfield with Cedar Rapids. Its population is just under 1,300 people, and it is the perfect bucolic setting for raising a family. Especially if you’re a middle-America power couple like Sheriff David Hutten and Dr. Judy Hutten. They are universally respected by the town, and are deferred to in all matters. So when three-year-chip AA veteran Rory Hamill shows up on the little league ball-field smack dab in the middle of Opening Day with a shotgun and a vacant look in his eyes, David gets sympathy and not flack when he has to put the presumably off the wagon rummy down. | That is, until other vacant-eyed townspeople without a history of drinking start going apeshit on their loved ones, and in one case even whistling a happy tune and mowing the lawn while his family burns to a crisp in the inferno that he himself started for just that purpose. A few plot developments later we learn that a small plane crashed a few days before…directly into the lake that feeds the town drinking supply reservoir. Wondering what the plane could have been carrying, David shuts down the water supply, but he’s a day late and a dollar short: the government is now involved. And we all know how that goes. |  Is it hot out here, or am I just crazy? |
Yes, it turns into a first-rate military clusterfuck. Orderly quarantine (for it is an engineered virus, of course) and evacuation turns into a full-scale riot, which in turn leads to an Ogden Marsh near-genocide. Our survivors, David, Judy, Deputy Russell Clank, and PA Becca Darling now need to find some way out of their beloved hometown, a hometown now being strafed by fully-armed helicopters and stationed with troops ordered to shoot on sight and incinerate the corpses. All that plus they must evade grisly death at the hands of whatever infected stragglers are still left in the town.  Yeah, good luck with that, folks. | As I said earlier, the tension in this film is the key to its success. In contrast to Romero’s film, which tried to serve two masters, Eisner’s update wisely chooses to pick one team, The Hutten’s, and stick with them throughout the film. Thus we only learn of plot events through their eyes, as they struggle to uncover what blew their lives to shit and deal with their friendly neighbors trying to do perversely violent things to them. Timothy Olyphant and Rahda Mitchell, as The Huttens, own their roles, and that is as much a key to the film as the superb direction. And Joe Anderson as Deputy Russell Clank is pitch-perfect in his role, just as he also was as Matthias in The Ruins. Playing a German and then an American, you’d never guess he was really British. I hope to see him in more horror films in the future. |
| What makes The Crazies an effective horror movie, as well as the tension, is its unflinching look at the human condition. Both the good and the bad. Much effort is spent showing us the internal battle of the infected, going homicidally manic against their will, most times with only facial expressions and stances to convey that. And the military are not demonized, even as they do inhumane things, which is unheard of in films of this nature. As far as the uninfected civilian population goes, I think the best example of that inner struggle between loyalty and survival is summed up in a conversation between David and a friend as they are both separated from their spouses and are being herded onto a bus. When David confides he is going to make a break for it and go back for Judy, his friend tries to talk him out of it. David considered him for a moment and says, “If you don’t ask my why I can’t leave without my wife, I won’t ask how you can leave without yours.” That lines hits just as hard as seeing an infected dude taking a double-tap to the head. |  Don't worry, Mr. Romero, you been done real proud. |
In closing: see this movie. I can count on one hand how many times in the past ten years that I have literally strained against my seat-back in a theater as events unfolded on the screen. Three side-notes, real quick: 1. The film opens with a Johnny Cash song, which I like to think was a nod to the aforementioned Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. 2. Be on the lookout for the Lynn Lowry cameo, a nice nod of respect to Romero’s original. 3. Mr. Eisner: my lauding of you here does not excuse you from your responsibility to your forthcoming The Brood remake. That is a long-time favorite of mine, and if you fuck it up I shall be very cross, indeed.
|
