The Crazies

Movie Grade: B

When House of Wax came out in 2005 starring Chad Michael Murray and Elisha Cuthbert I thought it was an incredibly scary, original idea for a movie. I left the theater thinking, ‘Finally, something fresh in the horror genre!’ Then, of course, I was told that it was actually a remake of a 1953 film and my enthusiasm immediately deflated.

I had the exact same feeling when I left The Crazies. Again, having no idea that The Crazies was a retooling of a 1973 film, I thought again, how fresh and different. But this time despite its remake status I stand behind my original impression of the film as being suspenseful, engaging and well worth watching!

I obviously have not seen the classic 1973 film so I can’t venture any comparisons between the two but I can say that taking this film by itself the idea behind the story is very interesting and leads you down a very non-traditional ‘horror’ path. I hesitate to even categorize this as a ‘horror’ film, it’s more an ‘outbreak containment’ film similar to a 28 Days Later or Cabin Fever kind of movie.

This eventual kill-fest opens in Ogden Marsh, Iowa. It’s the most typical small town USA type of place that I’ve ever seen. The town’s population is so small that everyone knows each other by first name and the idea of anything new or shocking ever happening is completely alien to them. That is until the inhabitants of this quaint little town start to go a little mad.

Alpha male Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) is the first to encounter these bizarre happenings as he is forced to shoot a friend in the head during a baseball game. From that moment on things get stranger and stranger for him and his doctor wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) as slowly and inexplicably this illness spreads throughout the community. The terror escalates when an unexplained government containment team enters the town and begins a systematic extermination of all infected people. The couple along with friends Becca Darling (no, seriously that’s her name) (Danielle Panabaker) and Deputy Sheriff Russell Clank (again, that is seriously his name) (Joe Anderson) have to escape the town before they are killed by either the government troops or the hordes of people who used to be their friends, “the crazies.”

There are plenty of genuine moments of suspense and even a few well earned scares that had me jumping back in my seat. And the most unnerving thing about the entire film is the way that “the crazies” act. You can put all the make up you want on a monster or a demon and it will never be scarier than someone with a dead blank look in their eyes staring at you while whistling. It gives me the chills just thinking about it. It’s the

Children of the Corn syndrome or more recently The Strangers where stillness is far more eerie and unnerving than anything else.

The characters all play their designated roles well and serve the plot. The one actor who is able to peek out behind the archetype is Timothy Olyphant. There are several moments where that Machiavellian glimmer in his eye shows through and there he is plain as day. He brings a dark sense of humor and playfulness to all of his roles and I was happy to see that he was able to do the same thing here.

The thing that really sets this film apart from other ‘our-heroes-must-survive-fare’ is that there are no ‘bad guys’ here. You can’t really root for anyone to be killed because the people who are in the wrong are never seen. You can’t hate “the crazies” for being sick and you can’t hate the soldiers for wanting to contain it. It creates an interesting shifting of loyalties dynamic for the viewer.

My main complaint with the film is that so much of it was shot in the dark that at times it was tough to decipher exactly what was going on. Lighting a film that’s supposed to be shadowy and sinister is a huge challenge because you have to walk that line between making things visible but not making them look well lit; it’s tough and they succeeded for the most part but there were more than a few moments when I felt like I had missed something important.

The Crazies is definitely one of the better suspense films I’ve seen in a while. Any movie whose course is not immediately clear to me within the first few minutes impresses me. The fact that I was kept guessing and quite frankly freaked out for as long as I was says a lot. If you’re in the mood to make your skin crawl and have some fun along the way, this is the one to see.

Movie Grade: B

Synopsis:

About the inhabitants of a small Iowa town suddenly plagued by insanity and then death after a mysterious toxin contaminates their water supply.T