2010 12
The Crazies (Film Review)
In the opening credits of The Crazies, we catch fleeting images of fire and devastation, before flashing back 48 hours earlier, to an ordinary farming community. It all looks normal enough, but the voice of Johnny Cash singing “We ‘ll Meet Again” over images of small- town Americana tells you everything you need. These people don’t know it yet, but they ‘re doomed.
David Dutton (Timothy Oliphant) is the Sheriff of Ogden Marsh, a sleepy Iowa town. His wife Judy (Rhada Michell) is the town’s Doctor. Nothing ever happens in Ogden Marsh. Until one day, during a Little League baseball game, the town drunk shows up in the field with a shotgun. David is forced to shoot him, but the coroner later informs him that the man wasn’t drunk. At the same time, many of the town’s residents’ are exhibiting strange behaviour. They are gradually being consumed by a calculating, murderous rage that makes them want to kill everyone and everything (kinda like me on Monday mornings). Very soon the phones don’t work and the army quarantines the whole area, rounding up the survivors and shooting everyone else on sight. The Duttons- along with Judy’s friend Becca (Danielle Panabaker) and David’s Deputy (the awesome Joe Anderson), are left to figure out what is happening by themselves. Could there be something wrong in the town’s water supply?
D’ ya think?
The Crazies is a remake of George Romero’s 1974 thriller. The original was a flawed film and, surprisingly, the update mostly works because it focuses more on tense set pieces than gore and the performances are uniformly excellent (especially Oliphant, who should have been a star by now). Like in the remake of Dawn Of The Dead, what’s missing is Romero’s trademark anti- authoritarianism and message of civil disobedience. I of course, am a middle- class citizen of Athens, not New Orleans. A week ago I could dismiss George Romero as fucking hippy and his vision of a community abandoned by the Government and plagued by a tide of violence as irrelevant. On the other hand…
(photo by Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)
…maybe not. The Crazies is far from perfect, but it’s also a tense and weirdly prescient little film- even in remake form. Recommended.
-Dimitris Kontogiannis-
About the Author: CnB
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