Review by Sean Moreland: Breck Eisner’s The Crazies" begins with scenes of a small town destroyed, its homes and storefronts on fire, its streets desolated, its welcome banner arcing, flaming, to the street, then proceeds to flash back two days earlier in order to explain the chaos that's come to Ogden Marsh, Iowa. In short, townspeople go berserk, beginning with a shotgun-wielding farmer who walks on-field during a baseball game. The town's authorities, represented by husband and wife team Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and Doctor Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell), as well as Deputy Russell Clank (Joe Anderson), quickly discover that the cause of all this violent behavior is a downed government aircraft carrying a mysterious biological weapon (referred to by the codename "Trixie"), which has polluted the local water supply. Soon all hell breaks loose in a town whose welcome sign declares it "The Friendliest Place on Earth," now a zone where biohazard-suited feds and trigger-happy Marines run amok alongside rabid citizens, all of whom indiscriminately exterminate everything in their path.

The actors make a game attempt at enlivening this lackluster script. Typecast Olyphant competently conveys his stoical and good-hearted town sheriff ("Deadwood," a century later!) and Mitchell does a decent job as Judy. But neither is able to overcome the flat dialogue and perfunctory characterization that is epidemic (sorry!) throughout this film. "The Crazies" is loosely based on George A. Romero's 1973 film of the same name, but Eisner's remake aligns itself more closely with the zombie-apocalypse subgenre than Romero's did (a probable attempt to placate fans who associate Romero's name with the living dead). The eponymous Crazies themselves, after a day or two of violent delirium, develop a decrepit appearance reminiscent of both the Infected from "28 Days Later" and the varicose-veined Darkseekers from the lamentable "I Am Legend" (a zombie by any other name would, it seems, stink just as quickly).

The film's inconsistent portrayal of the "Trixie" victims is one of its major failings. While they feature several zombie characteristics (bleeding orifices, rotting parts, red-reflective feral eyes), they also exhibit a great deal of strategic predatory behavior. It's as though Eisner has (con)fused his source material with both Romero's 'Dead' films and the cannibalistic mutants of "The Hills Have Eyes" or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." One Crazy mother and son duo even tie Dr. Dutton to a chair in order to lure Sheriff Dutton to them, so they can attempt a lucid, gloating (and almost super-villainously exposited) revenge for the shooting of their baseball-hating Crazy patriarch. I find it very hard to buy such a strategic, premeditated and vengeful murder from red-seeping, slavering, and slowly disintegrating psychotics, but maybe that's just me.

Where Romero's film alternates between two major plot arcs—the first concerns townspeople struggling to survive the epidemic and its ensuing chaos, and the second concerns the US military's efforts to contain and eliminate the outbreak—Eisner's take streamlines this construction by focusing exclusively on the point of view of the survivors, especially that of the Duttons. In terms of pacing, it's easy to see why he made this decision. The film has lost the alternating speed and slowness which is a signature of Romero's films, opting instead for the relentless tempo characteristic of recent zombie-apocalypse revisions such as "28 Days Later" or the "Dawn of the Dead" remake. Unfortunately, it also serves to undermine the powerful division between the world of individuals and families and that of governments and institutions that Romero so potently underlines with narrative juxtapositions. While the original's lengthier meditation on the cause and consequences of the bio-warfare weapon "Trixie" may have slowed the pace of the film and challenged the attention spans of its audiences, it also served to make the fast-paced and startle-oriented sequences more effective.

Because of the relative uniformity of its pacing, the scare sequences in Eisner's film quickly become predictable. He relies too heavily on generic startle shots, showing the audience a threat unseen by the onscreen characters. The filmmakers have an unfortunate over-fondness for framing one or more of the main characters in a medium shot center screen, a ubiquitous Crazy coming into view behind them either by a slow pan or a quick step into view. After seeing this device used about half a dozen times in a half hour, even scare-susceptible "greenhorn" horror viewers are unlikely to spill any popcorn or emit any gasps in response to it. And it's ultimately this, rather than the film's lack of black humor, social satire, and emphasis on cultural taboos (Eisner's film shies away from the incest motif that emerged in Romero's) that is likely to disappoint genre fans.

Last Word: Loosely based on George A. Romero’s 1973 film of the same name, Breck Eisner’s “The Crazies" has a big budget, some slick but predictable camerawork, and the buckets of blood requisite to the recent spate of studio horror remakes...but it has very little else.

Review By:
Sean Moreland

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