The Crazies

The Crazies (2010) is set in a small town in Iowa. In the middle of a baseball game a man walks onto the field carrying a rifle. Within days people around the town start behaving the same way: calm, quiet and lethal. As the sheriff and his doctor wife look into it, the army seals the town off. The source is George A. Romero's film of the same name from 1973. His original concerned a military biological weapon getting into the water supply, and its real subject was distrust of government in Vietnam era America. The remake's best decision is how it shows the illness. The infected do not become running creatures; they retain part of their personality and commit violence with complete calm. That takes the scenes out of the zombie register. Breck Eisner directed. Timothy Olyphant plays the sheriff and Radha Mitchell his wife. The sequence people remember is in the hospital, with a character strapped to a gurney and a man with a saw. Romero was credited as an executive producer on the remake. It runs 101 minutes. Good for: outbreak tension, small town horror, and completing the original. Less good for: the political critique is far weaker than in the original; the army stands as a threat but the reasons go unexamined. The violence is graphic. The characters are types and the last act becomes a familiar escape.