There are places where we say you shouldn’t drink the water. Well one of those places is Ogden Marsh. An American small town where farming is the only booming business. A rural place where houses are not right next to each other and where neighborhoods do not exist. This town is where The Crazies takes place and where madness and chaos occur.
David Dutten (Timothy Olyphant) is sheriff of Ogden Marsh. His wife (Radha Mitchell) is the family doctor for the whole county. It is just a small, quiet town. Or should I say was. The terror begins when a man interrupts a baseball game holding a shotgun. He is believed to be drunk due to his past, but their reason changes once they find no alcohol in his blood at all. And then a man locks his wife and child in a closet and burns the house down. These are unimaginable and unspeakable events, and everyone soon realizes their town is plagued by a virus. A deadly one.
The movie always keeps the perspective of the people in the town. The government quarantines the area and won’t let anyone in or out. That doesn’t just go for the infected. It’s for the uninfected as well. The movie is tense and brutal at times. Some of that brutality is from the sick and other times, it comes from the government.
The Crazies contains a lot of themes that involve viruses, government involvement and conspiracies, and the basic principle of survival. The movie is a remake from a George Romero movie of the same name.
This movie is better than your average horror movie because it never comes off as cheap or tacky. It sticks to a nice, even pace full of suspense and some actual scares. It likes to use sound and noises, which are used effectively. There is a scene during which a man is dragging a pitchfork down the hall and all you hear is the noise it makes against the floor. Oh -it’s leaving a trail of blood as well.
The performances are good and believable for the most part, and it never comes close to being just plain stupid. The Crazies does what few “scary” movies can do today. It delivers on its promise of delivering scares, action, blood, and gore. But it is all done in a skillful way from director Breck Eisner. Eisner took a movie from 1973 and made it up-to-date and his own with improvements. That is a difficult thing to do nowadays.
Brandon Vick is a member of The Music City Film Critics’ Association, the resident film critic of the SoBros Network, and the star of The Vick’s Flicks Podcast. Follow him on Twitter @SirBrandonV and be sure to search #VicksFlicks for all of his latest movie reviews.
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