Imagine living in a small town where everything is safe and
happy... until suddenly it isn't. Imagine your friends and
neighbors going quickly and horrifically insane. In a terrifying
tale of the "American Dream" gone horribly wrong, four friends
find themselves trapped in their hometown in The Crazies, a
reinvention of the George Romero classic directed by Breck Eisner
from a screenplay by Ray Wright (Pulse, Case 39) and Scott Kosar
(The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).David Dutten
(Timothy Olyphant) is sheriff of Ogden Marsh, a picture-perfect
American town with happy, law-abiding citizens. But one night,
one of them comes to a school baseball game with a loaded
, ready to kill. Another man burns down his own
house...after locking his wife and young son in a closet inside.
Within days, the town has transformed into a ening asylum;
people who days ago lived quiet, unremarkable lives have now
become depraved, blood-thirsty killers, hiding in the darkness
with s and knives. Sheriff Dutten tries to make sense of
what's happening as the horrific, nonsensical violence escalates.
Something is infecting the citizens of Ogden Marsh...with
insanity.Now complete anarchy reigns as one by one the townsfolk
succumb to an unknown toxin and turn sadistically violent. In an
effort to keep the madness contained, the government uses deadly
force to close off all access and won't let anyone in or out -
even those uninfected. The few still sane find themselves
trapped: Sheriff Dutten; his pregnant wife, Judy (Radha
Mitchell); Becca (Danielle Panabaker), an assistant at the
medical center; and Russell (Joe Anderson), Dutten's deputy and
right-hand man. Forced to band together, an ordinary night
becomes a horrifying struggle for survival as they do their best
to get out of town alive.
.com
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This 2010 remake of a somewhat obscure 1973 George Romero
picture injects a mysterious virus into the water supply of a
small Iowa town, and the consequences are… well, you didn't
expect the consequences to be positive, did you? The movie is
called The Crazies, after all. So when local folk begin acting a
mite peculiar, it just means they've gone to the well too
often--literally. Borrowing the structure of Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, the remake gets off to a clumsy start, but as the
noninfected rally around the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and his
doctor wife (Radha Mitchell), the action becomes streamlined and
reasonably inventive. Director Breck Eisner has a particular
knack for finding ingenious ways of killing people (a
through the hand becomes a useful tool for the sheriff in one
turn-the-tables moment), and he's been wise enough to hire
respectable actors for the top-lined duties; along with Olyphant
and Mitchell, there's also Joe Anderson (Across the Universe) as
a loyal, amped-up deputy. If the movie misses the tart
social-context stuff that Romero does so well, it at least fills
the bill when it comes to the chase-and-escape business of a
contemporary horror picture. The spate of such 21st-century
remakes of 1970s horror pictures misses the raw, raggedy unease
of those low-budget projects, but if you're going to make a slick
new update, The Crazies is the way to do it. --Robert Horton
Stills from The Crazies (Click for larger image)
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