Another Friday, another zombie movie. The zombie genre was created was essentially created by George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Since then, the zombie genre has come in and out of popularity, with the 2000s being a popular period. Everyone wants to make a zombie movie and everyone wants to watch a zombie movie.
The Crazies is a zombie movie, some may argue this, but it’s not a traditional zombie movie. In The Crazies, based on George Romero’s 1973 film of the same name, the infected citizen’s of the Iowa town of Ogden Marsh are not in search of flesh and blood for food but rather to destroy it. A zombie by any definition is simply a mindless person. That is exactly what happens to the people of the town. They become mindless people bent on killing everyone around. We can open the debate in the comments about whether this is a zombie film but I’m just going to say you’re wrong if you think it’s not.
The Crazies is only successful because Breck Eisner has created a set of characters that we actually care about. Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, playing the town sheriff and doctor and a married couple, are trying to escape the town. Olyphant is a great actor. We will excuse him for Hitman. Everyone is allowed to make one serious mistake, but he gets no more mistakes like that one.
In this film he does what few hero/zombie killers are able to do, he makes us feel like this could really happen. I know how I would act if zombies took over my town. I’d probably piss my pants but I’d try my damnedest to hold it together. Although the pressure of the situation would obviously start tearing me apart. Olyphant conveys those emotions better than anyone I’ve seen in this genre. Most actors are allowed a brief breakdown in the early stages of the film but suck it up and somehow become superheroes. Even my favorite zombie movie 28 Days Later is guilty of this. Olyphant carries his stress on the outside as he struggles to make it through each day and for that I hope he makes it.
Outside of that the movie doesn’t progress past the clichés of the genre. There are cheap scares. The specifics of the disease are never explained. The infection is so vague that I’m not sure who is in danger of being infected during the film. I go back to my zombie film clichés and think any fluids will carry the infection, but that may not be the case in this movie. I don’t know, because they don’t tell. The ending is predictable, as is nearly every scene. You know who’s going to die when they’re going to die.
It’s a horror film. So I never have a lot of expectations going into these movies but I hope, I pray that I will at least care if the main character lives or dies. That’s all that I really care about. The worst thing about horror movies is when the leads are disposable. I do want to give the film credit for not going over the top with the violence or the deaths. It’s so easy in movies like this to create ridiculously unbelievable situations that end with a decapitation or exploding bodies. The violence in this film was very tame and appropriate for the story. So basically check it out. It’s a fun film with interesting characters and Timothy Olyphant is damn sexy.
