Fear Thy Neighbor.
Things get a little less boring in the sleepy town of Ogden Marsh when a certain nasty something swims its way into the population's drinking water, turning everyone into raving lunatics. Then, the military pops in to clean up their mess but it only complicates things for the uninfected who try to escape.
Another case of a trailer misleading the audience into thinking a movie is going to be something it's not. My impression was that it was going to be another 2004’s Dawn of the Dead/28 Days/Weeks Later type of movie with crazy people running around ripping everyone apart. Not so much. Instead, we have a small group of people whose main rivalry erupts between them and the military coming that’s barged in and trying to fix the situation. The crazies really just act as a backdrop to the government shenanigans taking place.
The film starts out with a small town baseball game. Things are going along fine until a presumably intoxicated man storms the baseball field with a shotgun. Sheriff David confronts the man, resulting in his death. While definitely an odd occurrence, everyone writes off the man’s actions as a drunken incident. That is, until another family is attacked. And then all communication is cut off. And that is about the extent of the madness before the military come, round everyone up and split them into two groups: infected and uninfected. David is deemed safe while his wife, Judith, is put into the sick bunch. From there, David makes his way through the military and the madness to find his wife, picking up various uninfected and escapees during his trip. Does he find his wife or has she gone crazy? Will he even survive the journey? And in the end, what will David and the survivors do in a town full of crazies and a ruthless army of troops whose sole mission is to take out the entire population?
I have not seen the original nor do I plan to. The trailer for the original looks absolutely abysmal and therefore I’m not interested. And I call myself a hardcore horror fan? Ha! So, I’m judging this baby based on this film alone…and I guess the expectations I had after viewing the trailer. I have to admit I was slightly disappointed by the lack of actual crazies and crazy chase sequences that went down. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t interactions with some of the crazy inhabitants of the town but these get downs only consisted of about two to three crazies at a time. The action is intimate and in your face and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that but I was hoping for something a bit more epic and wider in scope. For example, in the trailer, you see a horde of people smashing down a gate and running free. That image captured that epic scope that I hoped would carry throughout the film. While I was hoping those people would smash through the gate and then run amok among the townspeople, unfortunately those people were only suspected of being infected and were just trying to escape their imprisonment to find their love ones. Not exactly the blood quenching scene I was expecting it to be. And when the town is overrun with the crazies, we are only given the carnage after the fact in the form of empty streets and burned cars.
If you’ve seen Dawn of the Dead or the 28 movies, then you’ve seen The Crazies. Humanity goes down the drain, the government intervenes, the government fails, a small group of people try to find refuge, they pick up a few survivors along the way, someone gets bit/gets sick, one dimensional characters die after having about fifteen minutes of screen time and then the end leaves enough room for fifteen more sequels, each one worse than the other. That’s not to say that the action wasn’t tense because it was. That’s not to say that the deaths weren’t gritty and gruesome because they were (although not explicitly gory). That’s not to say that the film was boring because it wasn’t. I guess I just feel like the action was more between David and the military rather than him against the crazies, although he does run into quite a few.
I liked the film. I probably say that as a hardcore zombie/mass murder movie junkie. I'll pretty much enjoy anything resembling a zombie-themed genocide. At the same time, that’s where my slight disappointment comes in. My main beef with the film was the lack of crazies, the lack of people going insane and taking out their families, friends and neighbors in gruesome ways. I guess it's just that the setup was great but never thoroughly explored. I guess when the film is called The Crazies, you expect to see some! Well, more than the two to three that appeared at a time. On top of that, there were a few plot holes that came to mind after some reflection. Other than that, I think it was a solid movie.
3 out of 5.
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