For a remake of a little known George Romero flick, The Crazies is actually pretty decent. Set in the small Iowan farming town of Ogden Marsh, a place where everyone knows everyone’s name and business (and I don’t just mean occupation), The Crazies builds its plot around neighborly paranoia and distrust in government. Though originality is often praised, and a lack of condemned, it is not a defining quality of “good art,” and sometimes, the old tricks are the best tricks.
With Romero executive producing, The Crazies draws heavily from his themes on the fragility of civil society. Olyphant seems comfortable wearing a sheriff’s hat yet again as David Dutton, portraying the same kind of strong-willed moralist he did in Deadwood. Mitchell plays his wife, Dr. Judy Dutton. They’re two kind-hearted peas in a pod. Ogden Marsh is comprised of a Main Street, a baseball field and farm houses, so when Rory, the former town drunk, shows up in centerfield wielding a shotgun during the big game and gets shot by the sheriff, it’s a big deal. Sheriff Dutton assumed Rory was drunk, but when other townspeople start staring off into the middle distance, eyes glazed over like the devil’s donut, it becomes quite apparent that strange things are afoot in Ogden Marsh.
As well as the seemingly random trances occurring around town, there’s a mysterious plane crashed in the swamp, unmarked black SUVs and a creepy lady singing as she rides a bicycle. None of this is giving anything away in the fairly predictable plot. The screenscribes have a not-so-impressive repertoire of recent horror remakes, so the plot stays in familiar territory, but it follows its own logical conclusions and is well-paced, with some humorous-without-being-cheesy one-liners that serve as good after-scare breath mints, like a cigarette after.
As a horror film, The Crazies works quite well. It’s violent and unnerving without relying on noisy red herrings to coax out a false startle. The crazies may seem like zombies, but this infection lets its host retain some semblance of humanity, the darkest semblance. Rather than hunger for flesh or brains, they just want to kill you, for no real reason ‘tall. Ogden Marsh becomes a war zone in just two days, and watching Sheriff and Dr. Dutton try to make their way through it may not be very original, or funny, or heart-wrenching, but it is a scary good time.
