The Crazies / George Romero is often deemed the grandfather of the zombie. Responsible for the pentalogy of genre films beginning with Night of the Living Dead, he’s also the inspiration for endless imitations, some good (Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later), most not (Zombie Strippers,Redneck Zombies). Hollywood has returned to the well several times in recent years, with remakes of Friday the 13th, Halloween and a successful rehash of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead in 2004, so it makes sense that others would dip into the horror auteur’s lesser-known films. What’s surprising is who’s dipping–and that on many levels, it works.

Breck Eisner is the son of former Disney head Michael Eisner and the director of Sahara (a film listed as one of the biggest flops of all time). He’s since had his budget reeled in tighter (if $20 million can be considered tight) and his family-friendly linage disowned. The result is a remake of The Crazies trimmed of the excesses found in both Sahara and Romero’s original. Of course, with a storyline that mirrors that of the zombie oeuvre there’s not a lot that you need to spend on, aside from the prerequisite gore, but even that is scaled down (slightly) from the torture-porn horror of late, and brings horror aficionados a long-needed return to scares achieved mostly through mood, tone and dread.

The small town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is supposed to be a Rockwellian dream, the friendly, down-home kind of place where the local sheriff supports the Little League team. But when the one resident walks on the baseball field, dead eyed and wielding a shotgun, while another fiddles with his lawn mower while his family burns, it doesn’t take long the good ol’ boys in law enforcement (Timothy Olyphant and Joe Anderson) to piece together that something is affecting their small-town lifestyle. A quick boat ride reveals (a little too quickly to be believable) that it’s the water, poisoned by a government chemical. Of course, the government wants to clean up its own mess, but its a little heavy-handed with its tactics, and as expected, the two take the law into their own hands while trying to survive the townsfolk and the military.

The sheriff’s wife (Radha Mitchell) and her assistant (Danielle Panabaker) join the pair and the foursome follows every horror cliché, from instructing somebody to wait behind alone, to grabbing their partner with force and velocity. There’s even a sudden braying of sound to jolt the audience. (Just once, when the characters are hiding from murderous marauders, I’d like to see someone whisper, “I’m right behind you,” instead of leaping out from behind the shadows). There are so many of these moments that we must assume that none of these characters have ever watched a movie. And yet, despite the obvious methods of madness, The Crazies effectively uses long tracking shots and the thousand-yard stare of the infected to heighten tension.

Romero always had metaphor on his mind when he created the mayhem, and his 1973 film had a lot to work with considering Vietnam, Nixon, Kent State and My Lai, all of which get nods in his version. While Romero’s crazies lost their minds, the military lost their heads, using the mentality of destroying the village in order to save it. We as an audience were left to wonder which side was worse. That’s almost absent in Eisner’s revamping, save for some Holocaust imagery and a lone soldier who says he didn’t sign up to kill unarmed civilians. Curiously, by Day 2 of the infection, the townsfolk degenerate, making the distinction between “us” and “them” obvious. It would have been more interesting to determine who is crazy by situation instead of by physical appearance. By focusing on the problem and not the cure, Eisner takes away the analogy of meeting the enemy (who is us) and turns the film into a survival-of-the-fittest competition. The result is ultimately satisfying, but it’s as cheap and lazy as its all-too-frequent scares.

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