Put down that shotgun, Rory!

Hey mister!

Breck Eisner's "The Crazies" represents one of my favourite types of movie: the American-small-town-gone-batshit-due-to-disease-or-collective-psychopathology thriller. American cinema often paints its rural areas as filled with homegrown saints and weed-whackin' good folk ("Sweet Home Alabama", "Runaway Bride") and it's always refreshing to see the apocalyptic potential in those locales. Surely, when some sort of apocalypse hits America, it will start in a small town? In "Eight Legged Freaks", giant spiders terrorised a town, itself a riff on the ground-burrowing cattle-guzzlers in the classic "Tremors". A recent entry into this subgenre, Frank Darabont's "The Mist", contrasted the threat of the danger lurking in the mist with the equally devastating human evil.

In  "The Crazies", a remake of George A. Romero's 1973 cult favourite, small town sheriff David (Timothy Olyphant, so great in "Deadwood", so wasted in "Hitman") and his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson) find their quaint town, Ogden Marsh, turning on itself as townfolk start acting crazy. Crazy in this sense means "homicidal" and "fueled by intense bloodlust". David's wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), the local doctor, also becomes involved in the events which compels David to take action like he couldn't even conceive of before.

Eisner's film does nothing new, really; bad mad people run amok, good sane people must survive. Of course, and surely this is not a spoiler, the military gets involved somehow, and the ending comes as no surprise. In this type of film, predictability is not by default a negative quality. It's a highly competent thriller filled with much gore and brutality and a few special moments which had me petrified. Admittedly, what one considers scary or frightening is as patently subjective as what one considers funny. The film isn't meant to be "The Descent". Unfortunately, Eisner relies on musical cues for scares too much, which lessens the film's overall impact. As is to be expected the make-up in this kind of film has to be state of the art, and it is; every open wound glistens.

What to make of "The Crazies" thematically? Is it trying to educate us about military interventionism, and how it messes things up instead of smoothing them out? How military assistance is sometimes worse than their absence? If that's the case, the film hearkens back to a key theme of 1950s and 1960s American SF. Indeed, insofar as the film presents the military (re)action in this film, especially their solution to the problems in Ogden Marsh, it is clear that they are as much part of the destruction around them as whatever is making the townsfolk go ballistic. 

"The Crazies" is limited in its commentary, though, and is refreshingly unselfconscious (for a film of its nature) about the type of film it is. There are no in-jokes, no cameos by zombie authorities (as far as I know). This is a serious thriller - how 'thriller' differs from 'horror' is another discussion - like Shyamalan's eco-snooze "The Happening" was. The difference is that "The Crazies" does not take itself as seriously as that film, and is all the better for it.

It goes without saying the "The Crazies", with its superficial social pessimism and its oodles of gore, is not for everybody. Still, if you appreciate the use of the standard issue pitchfork for purposes related to madness and mayhem, look no further for your fix.