The Crazies

Being big horror buffs, we recently got our hands on one of George A. Romero’s earliest underrated films that had been recruited for the remake, as Breck Eisner (Sahara) took on The Crazies for modern audiences this year.

The film follows a town that gets accidentally exposed to a biological weapon, leaving many of the survivors dangerously insane, inciting the Army to go in and clean up the whole messy affair with equally mindless violence. Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell head up the cast.

This show is cool because, while it is obviously a zombie movie, there is no mention or reference to the zombie genre in the script at all. In a way, it’s the opposite of Night of the Living Dead because it puts more emphasis on the living than the dead. There is a lot of bickering amongst the army personal, as they argue, find ways to assign blame but best of all, they spend the entire movie wearing gas masks and white suits so that they look the same and their speech is unintelligible! That could be ME behind the mask and you would not know it!

photo via www.filmofilia.com , www.thesun.co.uk
Meanwhile, our five heroes try to make their way through the countryside to freedom.
The best scary scenes that are repeated over and over again, but in a damn effective manner is where the camera zooms in on the unassuming subject (foreground) about to be attacked by one of ‘the crazies’ (background) who just silently watches his prey. Too damn nerve wrecking for words. I screamed like a hundred times!

Anyway, not the best of horror flicks but not the worst either. I give it maybe 70% on the horror scale of 1 – 100%. What I did not like about the movie was that The Crazies jumped from scene to scene, scenario to scenario, without much regard for cohesion but then again, I have to admit though, the scare factor was there.

The fun part is watching all the silly square and law abiding citizens become violent zombies with blank stares and then being killed off in different ways, as they become dangerous. The parts of the show where I was not shrieking, I was Laughing out Loud ! Good entertainment.