Mar

The Crazies: Review

By admin

The film director known as George “king of zombies” Romero is only known for his gory social allegories the “Dead” series (Night,Dawn,and Day of the living Dead).These were the standard for the modern zombie flick. In between making Night of the living dead and Dawn of the Dead he also made two other films not zombie related, one was “Martin” a variation of a vampire movie and “The Crazies” a bio-terror movie. Both films flopped and only true fans have seen them, not saying they’re bad movies, just not widely seen. Now fast forward 37 years later and The Crazies gets the remake treatment…does it suck? Heeelllll to the NO.

If anyone has been reading my posts you already know what a huge fan of horror movies I am and let me tell ya this, movie delivers, BOY does it. Like the awesome “Dawn of the Dead” remake, this version is much better than the original. I guess it helped that George Romero helped produce this remake.”The Crazies” is about a military plane crashing in a lake that just so happened to be carrying a military grade biological weapon, A virus that causes people to go violently insane. When I say violently I mean it turns you into a murderous being who only exists to kill, KILL, KILL (a la 28 days/weeks later) only they seem to have higher brain functions like pre-meditation to murder (not completely mindless ). The lake water is of course the source of the towns drinking supply so gradually the whole town is affected by this “virus” and the carnage begins…ohhh the carnage.

What is the military doing the whole time this is happening, why planning a quick and somewhat quiet clean up of their tragic mistake, you can guess what that means. But wait…..there are a handful of unaffected people around trying to leave town alive, these are the people we care about. They have to fight not only affected townsfolk (family and friends) but the military also. This hackneyed premise has been used thousands of times but in the hands of a capable director (Breck Eisner) can be verrrrrry entertaining, which this film is. Not since 80′s era Brian Depalma channeling Hitchcock have I seen horror movie suspense used so effectively not cheesily…sure there are a couple cheap scares and I mean literally 2,but the rest are genuine. This makes for a more scary than gory horror movie, the gore is there don’t get it twisted but the scares outweigh the gore in this one. A perfect first date movie as your date will be grabbing you in terror, a lot. I recommend this one highly. Even though it’s a genre flick, it delivered well. Timothy Olyphant’s performance and those around him help to elevate this film from being too corny and formulaic. Horror fans go see this you’ll love it…so will everyone else. This is one of those rare “good” scary movies. A definite 8.5

Rating: (8.5/10)