Eye Candy #35 - "The Crazies" (2010)

The Crazies (2010): This is a remake of George Romero’s 1973 original, the story of a small American town exposed to a biological weapon that turns its victims into homicidal maniacs. Moved from Romero’s Pennsylvania, we find ourselves in America’s heartland, in Ogden Marsh, Iowa, population 1600 and change. The local sheriff, David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), begins to experience a rash of unexplained homicides and before he has time to wrap his head around it, the US army swoops in to quarantine the whole town, sorting out the infected from the uninfected. So Dutton, along with his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson) and his pregnant wife (Radha Mitchell), need to escape before the army kills everyone they believe to be infected, while at the same time dodging anyone who already is indeed infected. The original was almost more of a parody of the military than it was a horror movie and had very little gore (about half the time spent was focused on the military’s failed effort to contain the weapon, called Trixie, and how they only really excelled at shooting civilians, not all of which were infected). Director Breck Eisner plays his version as more of straight horror movie, with the military remaining a fairly undefined shadowy presence (we only ever see two of them without their chemical suits on, which was one of the iconic images from the original film). We do get more gore here, some of it explicit. The movie jumps right into it and the pacing is non-stop – it starts going about 2 minutes after the credits start and really doesn’t stop from there. Not a zombie movie, as some people say, as the infected aren’t dead, they’re just cray-zee. I thought the cast was good, particularly the 3 leads though the wife character isn’t given a whole lot to do (she’s mostly damsel-in-distress fodder). But it’s good stuff, better than the original, and I enjoyed it. Woodchuck sez, “Me likey.”