The pretzels may make you thirsty, but the chemical weapons will make your town turn into THE CRAZIES (2010)

Posted by Daniel Metz

I really enjoyed this film, a remake of a George Romero film that I started and couldn’t finish this past weekend. In this film, a town is contaminated with a biological weapon and the community is set in quarantine. The result of the outbreak? People become what the gas-mask wearing soldiers call “Crazies,” or basically rotten-skinned homicidal types.

The film, in this sense, is very much like so many other films. Zombie movies from Romero to Danny Boyle and most in between share the same scares and basically the same villains. Films like [Rec] and other quarantine-horrors also share the same distrust for Government intervention and the horrifying reality of what a quarantine would (or might?) actually be like.

You want a formulaic thriller? How about this EXPLOSION?

Yes, the film is formulaic. At the same time, the cinematography is actually quite good. Director Breck Eisner, who hasn’t done anything of record but is slated to make a remake of the marvelous David Cronenberg childbirth movie The Brood, may be a very good director or maybe it was just lucky. The film seems ambitious, however, and is not simply the economical horror movie remake a la this past year’s Friday the 13th.

One thing I really liked from the movie was seeing lead actress Radha Mitchell. Apparently she has been working steadily since then, but all I know her from is the under-appreciated Woody Allen film Melinda and Melinda. Her dual role in that film is remarkable and an example of how Allen demands so much from his starlets and explains why so many of them win Oscars for their performances in his films.

Radha Mitchell: by the looks of it, she's no longer sipping white wine in Manhattan.

Yeah, the probably isn’t more to say. It’s suitably scary for the screamer crowd, and it is nice looking and psychologically interesting enough to keep you occupied for its 101 minute runtime. I like it much more than The Road, which features much of the same existential questions about survival but without any good pitchforking.

So, see it with your parents if you want to realize their greatest fears, and should you have children of your own some day, see it again to realize how much you love watching people get pitchforked.