The Crazies was Spectacular!!!!

Spectacular is a word I rarely use when describing horror movies, but "The Crazies" was bloody fantastic and the funny thing is....its really not all that original. Its no secret that "The Crazies" is a remake of George Romero's 1973 offering of the same name. Although I have never seen the original, from what I hear, the remake removes a lot of the sermonizing and commentary that tends to weigh down Romero's films and I would say in this case, that is to maximum effect.

What I would say "The Crazies" gets right is its use of tension, acting, and its scope for instead of concentrating on the practicalities of the "infected" its paints a very real, very harrowing picture of how this type of disaster would be played out in reality. Welcome to small town Iowa where a population of approximately 1,200 enjoy the quit pleasures of life until something strange enters the water supply and starts to turn the towns people into homicidal psychopaths. Enter sheriff David Dutton (an excellent Timothy Olyphant) a family man with a child on the way who one day has his world turned upside down at the local baseball game when an unsuspecting neighbor walks onto the field in a daze then draws a pistol at him. But what he doesn't know is that his quiet humble town is but a guinea pig in a conspiracy that will rock the town to its core.

Some will argue that "The Crazies" is a zombie pic, but I digress....its exactly what it says it is and doesn't claim to be anything more or less. Fast paced, bloody, and layered which is also a new one for a horror flick. Its the effectiveness of the storytelling that hooked me and the fact that the picture paints a very real, very unflinching view of how the government would treat such a scenario. In a word, the images are haunting and the action sequences shot with such flair that its amazing that almost all of them tend to give you that little surprise moment that you weren't really expecting. Imagine if someone combined "Quarantine" "Dawn of the Dead" and "Final Destination" into one film....then imagine that film being very good and you have "The Crazies".

With every movie I watch I know if its a movie I will one day own by the feeling I walk out of a movie theater with. The best films ultimately send you on a high or a feel good tide of goodwill. "The Crazies" doesn't even pretend to have a happy ending.....instead, it showcases a beautiful fight for the human spirit in a backdrop of hopelessness and despair. Unflinching in its starkness, heroic in its portrayals of inhumanity....just the way a horror flick should be.