George A. Romero launched the zombie shuffle into public consciousness with Night of the Living Dead, but it was Danny Boyle in 28 Days Later who sent them sprinting back into our collective fears. The rules of the game didn’t exactly change, but it did get a lot more frenetic. What to do, then, with a film like The Crazies, a remake of the 1973 Romero-helmed film of the same name, in which zombies are still mainly feared because they can jump out of shadows? What do you make of a competent modern zombie flick?
Directed by Brett Eisner (Sahara), The Crazies sees town sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) trying to keep the peace in sleepy Ogden Marsh, Idaho, as the town is gradually consumed by a mysterious illness that drives its victims into either catatonia or homicidal rage. Dread of the enemy, both infected and uninfected, drives the action, but that dread is a meagre addition to a genre that’s built on the quality of its visceral frights.
Whether it’s in the form of a government-engineered bioweapon that gives humans the flesh munchies or the thuggish soldiers sent in to gun down innocent and zombie alike, most zombie movies are sprinkled with liberal doses of anti-government paranoia. In The Crazies, that paranoia takes centre stage, with the main enemy clearly established as a shadowy government willing to watch from the safety of an orbital satellite feed as the aforementioned bioweapon and gung-ho thugs turn Ogden Marsh into a living hell.
If the politics are strong, though, the presence of the titular crazies isn’t. A few notable baddies crop up — a pitchfork-wielding principal who sees a ward of strapped-down patients as an easy game of whack-a-mole, a trio of hunters who just change their prey — but by and large the actual horror set pieces are few and far between. It makes sense for a community in rural Idaho to have an embarrassment of barns, but there’s a law of diminishing returns at play on repeated visits. A battle at a car wash, meanwhile, doesn’t feel nearly as scary as it must have seemed when jotted down at the Shell station.
The Crazies is a simple, efficient zombie movie; Eisner’s idyllic shots of midday rural farmscapes can actually be quite striking and Olyphant is a reliable leading man. But though there’s nothing especially wrong with the remake, shadows and a tyrannical military aren’t as satisfying as unstoppable, superhuman maniacs. Slow and shuffling, in the end, doesn’t win this race.
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)