The Crazies' Review

Posted on March 3, 2010 - 4:54am by michael The Crazies takes place in a small American town where a few of the locals suddenly go crazy and start killing people for no decipherable reason, leaving the town sheriff, his wife and his deputy (Joe Anderson) with the task of solving the mystery. There's a scene where the military has half a dozen or so of the town wives strapped to gurneys under suspicion of "being sick," and one of the crazies walks in and methodically jams a pitchfork into their stomachs one after the other, watching them scream and squirm while the life drains out of them. This is a scene that should have been pulled out of the projector, cut up into slivers and jammed under the fingernails of idiot screenwriters Ray Wright and Scott Kosar. "Hey, why don't you type that little scene up again now, gentlemen?" That scene alone cost the movie two full Beans, and still it's reiterated on the movie's poster. Go figure. That being said, however, these talentless hacks have now teamed up with director Breck Eisner and come up with a movie that, despite a total lack of even a hint of originality, is at least an entertaining enough retread. This is the highest compliment that I can give the movie as a whole, but it's not a small compliment, given the fact that the above-mentioned production team has yet to come up with a single good movie among the lot of them. Actually, I shouldn't say that. Kosar wrote The Machinist, but he also wrote the recent, immensely stupid remakes of The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and those handily cancel out even Christian Bale's astonishing dedication to his performance in The Machinist. Timothy Olyphant is David Dutton, the town sheriff. When a local resident with a history of alcohol abuse walks into center field with a shotgun during a town baseball game, David is forced to use force, setting off a chain of events that transforms the movie into a giant clich. Again, I remind you that it's not necessarily a bad clich, but a clich nonetheless. His wife, the town doctor (Radha Mitchell), begins getting strange cases, and when David finds things like a man on a hospital gurney with his eyes and mouth sewn shut, he's sure something's wrong. Especially when the doctor, his friend, attacks him with a bone saw. That can't be right. The whole zombie genre got a nice boost from recent movies like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, the surprisingly good 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, and Pandorum, but The Crazies is proof that it takes more than zombies, shotguns, and a good looking sheriff to make a good zombie movie. But the real problem with The Crazies is that it focuses on what might be the least important element of a zombie movie as the centerpiece of the plot what it was that turned your friends and neighbors into murderous crazies in the first place. This is generally something that's tossed into the movie through dialogue since it's little more than an excuse for the violent mayhem, but Eisner turns it into a whole government conspiracy. Not that that's entirely a bad thing. It actually gets pretty interesting at first, when a mysterious plane crash emerges as the probably cause of the whole thing, but as the hour mark passes and no one in the movie or the audience yet has any clue about what's going on, it becomes clear that the movie is trying our patience far more than it has any right to. There are plenty of good performances in the movie, but also plenty of empty scares as things pop out on screen with unsettling sound effects. I enjoyed for a while the mystery involved in trying to come up with a reason why the American military would descend on a small American town, shoot its citizens on sight and then blowtorch their bodies, although part of my enjoyment stemmed from a futile hope that there was an interesting and not-quite-so-predictable cause behind it all. Ultimately the movie is a ham-handed combination of Outbreak and your standard zombie movie, although not quite as good as you would hope an injection of Outbreak would make it. The performances are all impressive, including an underused Glenn Morshower, who plays one of my favorite characters in "24." Given the fate of his character in this movie, I'm guessing he and Eisner ended things badly when they worked together on Tango & Cash in 1989. The movie is based on George Romero's 1973 film of the same name, which I haven't seen but, unfortunately, the new one has exhausted my interest in the genre far too much for me to go back and watch it like I normally would. I didn't hate the movie, but it left a pretty shallow impression on me. I've probably just seen it too many times by now. The Bean Meter