It’s the first day of baseball in Ogden Marsh, Iowa, and everybody in town is present at the premiere game of the season to cheer on their local high school baseball team. Sheriff David Dutten (Timothy Olyphant) is also there, but he’s not expecting trouble…at least until an armed man strolls onto the playing field while the game is in progress. Dutten, who goes and confronts the man while the players clear the field, knows the gunman. It’s Rory (Mike Hickman), the town drunk who has apparently fallen off the wagon in a big way today. David tries dealing with Rory by speaking to him, yet Rory is unresponsive--until he tries to pull his shotgun on the sheriff. David shoots first, saving his life and perhaps the lives of many others.
But when the test results come back from the lab on Rory’s body, it showed that he had no alcohol in his system whatsoever. While David puzzles over this mystery, his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) has a tragedy of her own. Judy, a doctor, was treating a local man named Bill who was acting very strangely. But when she runs medical tests on him, they show nothing is wrong. Later that night, Bill murders his wife and young son. When David follows up on a lead about a plane crash, he discovers that the swamp that it crashed in feeds the entire town’s water supply, with Rory and Bill’s homes being the first in town to receive the water. But before David and Judy can even stop it, the denizens of Ogden Marsh begin to lose their collective nut.
Executive produced by George Romero, and directed by Breck Eisner, this new version of The Crazies is a tightly wound thriller with horror overtones that is simply enthralling to watch. Eisner wisely allows us get to know the characters, including the secondary ones, so that when the pandemic finally hits this sleepy little farm town, we feel a true sense of loss. And because we care so much what happens to David and Judy, thanks to the sympathetic performances from Olyphant and Mitchell, respectively, the movie becomes all the more suspenseful once they begin their struggle to survive. The intelligent script is careful not to leave any plot holes, and even if there are any, the film’s relentless pace doesn’t give you a chance to ponder them.
The Crazies also has several superb horror film set pieces that will whiten your knuckles--one of which is the extremely terrifying scene where Judy and Becca (Danielle Panabaker) are helplessly strapped down to medical gurneys, along with a group of others people, in a make shift hospital that had been abruptly abandoned by the military. They can only watch in horror while one of the infected comes into the room and starts killing the strapped down patients, one by one, with a pitch fork. It’s intense moments like this that really sets The Crazies above and beyond the muddled mash of horror movie remakes that have come out in recent years. Thanks to the sophisticated, clever manner in which it was made, the remake of The Crazies will garner as many fans as the original did.
--SF
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