The Not-So-Crazy Crazies

Esteemed drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs has a single three-word critique of a certain kind of genre picture: “too much plot.”  That's a little easy and dismissive, but it does speak to an underlying truth: the best horror and suspense movies have to be easy to follow, or you're in trouble. This particular genre is all about being In The Moment, especially if The Moment is designed to scare the heck out of you, and forcing the audience to pause and say, "Hey, wait a minute: why’s he doing that?  Who’s that guy again? Why is he doing that?" rips the viewer out of that Moment.  Beter to Keep It Simple.  Or even better: Keep It Relentless. 
The Crazies, Brent (Sahara) Eisner's from-the-bottom-up remake of George Romero's little-seen 1973 horror flick, definitely has that problem: way too much plot, too much confusion, for what should be a pretty straightforward story: a government toxin (or virus? Or ... something bad) is accidentally released in a small Ohio town. Exposure to it makes one go gradually, violently insane. And once a few random act of violence have been perpetrated on the small-town citizenry, the U.S. Government at its most sinister sweeps into town to round everybody up -- the healthy, the diseased, and the might-be-either-ones. The local Sherriff and his wife the local doctor must fight off the infected Crazies (who look more and more like your standard Romero zombie the more infected they become) while trying to avoid the equally dangerous U.S. troops in their evil khaki and creepy gas masks, who will just as soon kill or imprison you as look into your red, rheumy eyes.

Simple. Scary.  Bring in the zombies.
Unfortunately, The Crazies isn't that simple, even though it should be. The story is rife with convenient but inexplicable leaps in logic, inconsistent plot points, and an erratic pacing that goes from truly Romero-esque bang-bang chomp-chomp to very long, very slow sneaky-weaky jump-out-of-the-shadow moments that, quite frankly, we've seen a million times befoe.

No question about it, the actors are the best aspect of The Crazies. Timothy Olyphant of Deadwood and Justitifed is the quintessential strong but silent good guy, just like he’s been before and will be again.  Radha Mitchell, the Australian actress best known for Pitch Black, is sympathetic without being weak or stupid, and as surprisingly American doctor-wife. And British actor Joe Anderson, who’s met with unfortunate quasi-supernatural fate before in The Ruins, doesn’t fare much better here as Olyphant’s deputy. In fact, he has the toughest character arc of all, going from charming good ol’ boy to prick to hero in the space of ninety minutes (and with a lot of time off screen). The production values are very high as well, and there are a few "keeper" sequences that will please horror fans regardless of the total package. Expect to hear folks talking about the bone-saw scene, or the pitchfork scene, or the car wash scene, or the truck stop scene. All are terrific .. but all of them,  taken together, comprise about fifteen minutes of the movie. Which leaves a whole lot of waiting around for those few cool moments.

The "wait a minute, what?" interruptions are the real spoilers here. From the very beginning, you find yourself asking, "Wait, is this a toxin? Is it a virus? Is it only carried in the drinking water, or is it airborne, too? If it is in something as ubiquitous as the drinking water, how come some people are affected right away, and others not at all? And what exactly does it do to you? The first couple of victims are not enraged berserkers a la 28 Days Later, or mindless shamblers out of Romero’s Day of the Dead. The first victims look more befuddled than insane; the next set look mildly pissed off but absolutely rational in the stalking and incinerating of his innocent family.  And then the 28 Days contingent show up in full, rotting, glory. That's one of the oddest things about The Crazies: nobody seems all that crazy, at least not for the longest time. Though you can't blame the marketers for that; a movie called "The Sullens" or "The Befuddleds" probably wouldn't do nearly as well with the horror fanbase.

Then there's the completely illogical behavior of the U.S. Government. Not that you don't expect them to be evil -- hell, that's almost a given in horror movies. But you at least expect a certain level of competence as being so evil. After all, they've had plenty of practice.  But here, even though it's obvious very early in the film, barley after the credits, that the U.S. Government is not only behind this but well aware of the accidental infection from the before the beginning, it takes them forever to show up. The Crazy-Juice is a tailored biological agent, after all; the Feds know what it's going to do to the populace. So why do they hesitate on the evacuation until things get really bad? More: they have total satellite camera surveillance (again, we see that in the first three minutes); so why do they have such trouble finding rebellious evacuees and errant Crazies wandering around in broad daylight? Why can't they seem to construct a decent perimeter around a tiny Ohio town of 1,200 -- one sitting out in the open plains no less -- without holes big enough for an eighteen wheeler to drive through -- literally, an eighteen-wheeler.  In fact, if the Feds are as ruthless as they seem, why bother with evacuation at all? Why not initiate the Nuclear Option -- which the do, with only partial success -- right away, rather than day later. It's not like they're ever going to let any of the uninfected back into the public sector anyway -- this is a secret infection.  And thier concern for the well-being of the innocent citizenry is absent from Day One, Hour One.  So get on with it, man!

Maybe, underneath all the illogicality, the biggest problem with The Crazies is the sheer predictability of it all. There's not a scene, a character, or a camera move we haven't seen before, and some quite recently.  Eisner, who showed just how ham-handed he can be with action pictures in Sahara, shows the same unsurprising fumble-fingerosity right here. He isn't content to pull out every one of these well-worn horror-movie tropes a single time; we ge to see them two or there or even four times each. There's the "cheat," where a main character appears in the foreground, entering a scene ... then CAMERA ADJUSTS and oh! there's a bad guy standing right behind her, in the background!  There’s the "offscreen banger," where a Bad Guy gets the drop on a Good Guy -- gun in the face, pitchfork in the air -- and BANG, someone unexpected and unseen, off-screen and off-scene SHOOTS though a window or an open door and DROPS the bad zombie and SAVES the day! And of course there is the classic SHOCK CHORD, when something Bad or Good jumps out of the dark. As if the sudden boo! isn't enough, the director ads a ZINGGG! on the sound track -- which makes you jump in acoustical pain as much as psychological shock. 

It could be worse -- far worse. But there are just way too many been-there-done-that's and way too many questions for what should be an easy, straightforward slice of quasi-zombiesque Theater of the Paranoid pic to make this a worthwhile screamer. 
All that doesn't make The Crazies bad; it just makes it ... not bad.