Movie Review - The Crazies

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The Crazies opens with David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), a small town sheriff, shooting the "town drunk" just as he's about to go on what appears to be a murderous rampage. Dutton is the sort of the sheriff that knows his fellow citizens by first name and prefers to solve things non-violently. He is, after all, the chief law enforcement officer of a town so small it actually has a solitary "drunk". However, two things about the shooting incident haunt Dutton. First, even when drunk his victim was peaceable and second, his toxicology report came back with no trace of alcohol. When Dutton begins to encounter other townsfolk acting, well...crazy...he begins to suspect that something has breached the area's water supply. As the "infection" begins to spread, the military descends upon the city in an effort to quarantine it by brute force. Internment camps and martial law quickly become the order of the day and Dutton attempts to escape detention with his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson) and a teenage girl named Becca (Danielle Panabaker) in tow.

The film is essentially a B-movie conglomeration of other films. Part Jaws, part 28 Days Later with just a dash of High Noon and Outbreak for good measure. Typically that would be a bad thing. Surprisingly The Crazies gets the recipe just right. It borrows enough from each to be exciting without borrowing so much that it becomes a retread. Well-acted and smartly shot, the movie is effective because it manages to be exactly what it sets to be: a smart, low-budget zombie flick. (And yes, I know they're not technically zombies.) While the movie does fall victim to some horror movie clichés (falling while fleeing, fumbling for car keys), its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. It's by no means a great film. But it doesn't profess to be. What it is is an above-average, low-budget, sci-fi/horror flick. And those don't come around very often.

The Crazies gains much of it's resonance from it's topical subtext. Are the "true villains" an ever-encroaching government willing to kill it's citizens rather than expose its own incompetence or are the Heartland working-folk turned mindless zombies a metaphor for the Tea Party participants? Um....yes and yes. The film smartly manages to have it's cake and eat it too. Pick your paranoia or mix-and-match. They don't mind.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being 28 Days Later and 1 being Teenage Zombies, The Crazies gets a 7.

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