The Crazies

It's hard to keep a straight face when there is an upcoming horror remake. Previous remakes of The Stepfather, Prom Night, Sorority Row, The Messengers, One Missed Call (do you want me to continue?) have all tanked at the box office and have become the laughing stock of so-called horror. The Crazies, however, manages to separate itself from the dregs of such tomfoolery by taking a simple premise and throwing in a legitimate mystery (however outrageous it may be) for both characters and audience to figure out together. Trouble is, the mystery is solved far too early and we are left to helplessly watch the townsfolk survive what seems to be unsurvivable.

On the first day of spring (baseball has begun after all), a man walks onto the field carrying a shotgun and Sheriff Dutten (Timothy Olyphant) is forced to shoot him where he stands because this man, also known as the town drunk, was about to do the same to him. Another man is sent to the family clinic by his family where Dutten's wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), works. He seems to be incomprehensive to his surroundings and Judy thinks it's just a sick bug going around. Dutten, an intelligent man (they are few and far between in these horror films), tries to discover what is causing some of these townspeople to become belligerent and murderous. Taking the coroner's autopsy into account, Dutten hires a boat to scour the local lake and finds something that is, indeed, causing his town to go crazy.

Breck Eisner, whose only other major work was the forgettable Sahara, can't help but succumb to using the cliche elements of horror (first-person POVs, close angle shots of faces) but pulls it off by not yielding to the usual jump-out-and-scare-you routine. Kinda nice, since we already knew that the town was being overrun by crazy people anyway.

What also keeps The Crazies going is its ability to move the characters from place to place without dragging its feet. What I mean to say is that no where is safe. Even a car wash. As the town's population dwindles by the hour, both Dutten and his wife, along with the deputy (Joe Anderson) and Judy's young secretary, manage to move from location to location dispatching fellow townspeople when necessary and avoiding the military at all costs. No one will tell the town what is going on, so the group is left to fight for their own answers.

The Crazies, as crazy as it is, is not as crazy as it should be. The infected kill the uninfected without question (and the reason why is not entirely answered) but they're coherent enough to still understand the world around them. Understand that the crazies are not zombies, they are just humans who have succumbed to a virus that is slowly killing them and causing their skin to make them look like zombies. Despite its stop-and-go pace, The Crazies treats each scene as if the survivors are out of the forest, yet there is still something, or someone, wanting to end their quest for survival.

As the conclusion of the film nears, we are supposed to prepare ourselves for a sequel. This is horror, after all, and studios become blinded by the fact that they believe we want to see more of the same. It's evidenced by those remakes mentioned above. I'm sure The Crazies will bring in the same amount of cash as the usual horror remake (read: not much), but at least The Crazies is a movie I can watch again with serious intent instead of laughing at them like I usually do. B-