The best explanation why a citizen armed with a shotgun interrupted a little league baseball game is that maybe he had been drinking. At least that’s what the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) of a small Iowa farming community thinks until the coroner reports the guy had a 0.0 alcohol level. Things get stranger when another family man burns his home down and acts like nothing happened. The answer to what’s causing people to go crazy might lie in the town’s water supply, or an air force jet lying at the bottom of a swamp.
The Crazies is like seeing a new movie--for those like me, that is, who haven’t seen director George Romero’s 1973 independent horror original, which, according to IMDB.com, was made on a budget of $270,000. I can’t help but wonder if like all the great independent horror movies (Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street) of the late ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s made on a low budget, if Romero’s original was more effective and perhaps shocking.
If Romero’s version showed psychos plowing pitchforks into restrained townspeople strapped to gurneys in government labs, such a scene would probably stick in moviegoers’ minds like the ending shot of Leatherface running amok with a chainsaw in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). There’s nothing shocking when those same brutal scenes are reenacted today. I consider seeing a mother and son being burned to death tame by today’s violent standards.
There’s no doubt this new version was done on a bigger budget ($12 million) and the whole point was to be more graphic. The trouble is, The Crazies just doesn’t have any edge of your seat suspense and plays more like another end of the world/government conspiracy film than anything else – like we haven’t had enough of these doomsday flicks already.
