The underlying themes in The Crazies--distrust of those around us, the thin line between sanity and insanity, and the complementary terrors of organized versus hysterical violence--are potent themes for the horror genre, and director Breck Eisner (Sahara), working from a new script by Scott Kosar (an old hand at this game, having already penned the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror) and Ray Wright (Case 39), hammers them home quite nicely. This new version of The Crazies maintains Romero’s fundamental vision of the military power structure crashing down on the American heartland with full force while also remedying the fundamental budgetary problems and wooden acting of the original. Of course, there are a few elements of the film that veer off-course, particularly its confused depiction of the infected as unnecessarily zombie-ish ghouls, which undercuts the original’s most potent source of horror: the difficult distinguishing monsters from normal people (its most indelible image is a harmless looking granny plunging a knitting needle repeatedly into a soldier).

The story takes place in a tiny Iowa farming town that is the very epitome of middle American tranquility: open fields, quaint main street, busy baseball field. It is on the last of these that the horror begins, as a vacantly staring man wanders into right field with a loaded shotgun and must be put down by genial sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), whose pregnant wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) is the town doctor. Because the shotgun-wielding zombie was the former town drunk, it is assumed that he simply fell off the wagon, but soon there are other signs that something is amiss in the heartland, particularly after it is discovered that an enormous military plane has crashed in a nearby swamp.

Life in the small town quickly starts to come apart at the seams as otherwise normal people begin behaving violently, and soon it is overrun with soldiers in gas masks and protective gear who are rounding up the citizens and quarantining them in a hastily constructed internment camp on--you guessed it--the local baseball diamond. David and Judy manage to escape the madness, along with David’s deputy (Joe Anderson) and Judy’s teenage office assistant (Danielle Panabaker), but they literally have nowhere to go, as all the roads are blocked off and they have no idea what is happening, which aligns the film with all manner of 1950s-era paranoid sci-fi thrillers, particularly Don Siegle’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which stranded a handful of characters amid a sea of pod people.

In The Crazies the threats come from all side: not only are the surviving characters trying to avoid being either rounded up or shot by the military (a potent image of state forces turned on their own citizenry), but they also must avoid the hoards of infected “crazies” of the title, who are hellbent on bloodshed and nothing else. Eisner wisely structures the film along these parallel tensions, which eventually infiltrate the survivors in unnerving ways. Given what they’ve been through, when one member of the group begins acting rather irrationally, it is impossible to tell whether it is a result of stress finally cracking the character’s resolve or the infection taking over (this is also true of a group of redneck hunters whose violence against the populace may be infection-related or simply the result of general anarchy). Thus, the film sticks you squarely in a queasy game of “who’s the monster,” and that ambiguity keeps the film’s second half crackling, even when it gives in to a few too many climaxes that begin to stretch credulity. Nevertheless, The Crazies works surprisingly well, in terms of both its extended tension and its deployment of genuinely unsettling images and situations that linger in the mind long after it’s over.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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