UK Release Date: 26-02-2010
Starring: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Breck Eisner
Country: US

Breck Eisner’s loose remake of George A Romero’s low-budget 1973 shocker exterminates horrific subtext in favour of rabid action. When a local farmer walks onto the school field in small town Ogden Marsh during a crowded ball game, shotgun in his hand and mindless murder in his skull, he is confronted by the twitchy trigger finger of Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant). The farmer is clearly a sandwich short of a picnic and Sheriff Dutton promptly guns him down. So far, so average sick twisted male intent on talking down as many innocents with him as he can. But there’s worse in store for Ogden Marsh: the incident is merely a prelude to the transformation of its populace into violent psychopaths.

The Crazies possesses some genuinely tense moments and at least one soda-spewing jump in your seat thanks to a combination of skilful editing and sudden sledgehammer sound effects. As Sahara proved, Eisner has a flair for frenetic action sequences, but it has to be said that with each successive scene it becomes apparent that this is a biological contamination story for the masses, neither excessively gory nor disturbingly scary. The shocks are of the kinetic kind, and often wielded with the same panache as that of Ogden Marsh’s coroner with his pitchfork performing peremptory autopsies on living subjects strapped to gurneys. It also becomes clear that the screenplay, by Scott Kosar (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and Ray Wright (Case 39), is nothing like as nasty as a plot synopsis suggests.

The comic riffing that develops between Sheriff Dutton and Deputy Clank (Joe Anderson) diffuses tension instead of providing a pre-emptive lull before the next shock. Almost no horror film with a small motley band fighting hordes of mindless whatevers seems without such attempts at humour now (Willem Dafoe’s wise-cracking turn in Daybreakers was another jarring case in point, and of recent such films only Zombieland began the hoot-fest as it meant to go on), inviting off-the-peg cliché and genre parody which only serve to undermine the job of harrowing us as viewers. Although in the harrowing stakes, the always watchable Radha Mitchell as Judy Dutton acquits herself well, hiding and fleeing from lots of nasties on the prowl, having had plenty of training in Pitch Black and Silent Hill.

Brett Eisner’s The Crazies does contain a nod to Romero’s eternal pessimist’s signature theme of humanity with feet of clay, destroying itself from within for the sake of individual self-preservation when collectively faced with a terrifying threat from without. But here, that theme is overshadowed by the bare-faced conspiracy theory scenario of evil government: a small town faces being ruthlessly scourged after contaminant protocol is initiated by a satellite of the Big Brother government responsible for  watching over vast expanses of ploughed farmland and rural conurbations, and of course for dumping the biological doo-doos there in the first place, something we are left in no doubt about from the beginning. But subtext really isn’t the point of Breck Eisner’s The Crazies. Rather, the film is a cross between a Stephen King novel and a graffiti-daubed Norman Rockwell painting, its small town milieu a playground for lots of Hollywood grits ‘n’ apple pie characters to run around in, intent on doing some very horrid things to their screaming neighbours - and getting us to jump. As a fast food Friday night frightfest The Crazies is a lot of fun, but horror fans intent on chowing down on truly disturbing fare are likely to come away still hungry.