Zombie Movie of the Week

Zombie Movies

Welcome to Ogden Marsh, the friendliest place on Earth.

This week we review The Crazies, a film by Breck Eisner starring Timothy Olyphant.

Breck Eisner's The Crazies opens with a flash-forward scene depicting a hellacious end to the town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa. You see what is in store for the residents of this bucolic middle-America town while they are unknowingly going about the business of enjoying their simple if not boring lives.

Flash back now 2 days and we are introduced to Sherriff David Dutton, brilliantly played by Timothy Olyphant (of Deadwood fame). The movie is set in present day Iowa, a small town of 1200 people and our introduction to the local population takes place in a baseball field. The director adequately captures the simplicity and comfort of everday life in small towns unaffected by the hustle and bustle of the big city. It's this simplicity and comfort that ulimately add to the continuous tension that the director builds as it gradually becomes evident that something has gone horribly wrong in the friendliest place on Earth.

As the residents are sitting and enjoying America's game, the former town drunk appears and interrupts the first high school baseball game of the season by wandering onto the field with a shotgun and a dead-eyed expression on his face.

Sherriff Dutton’s pregnant wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), notices during her duties as the town doctor that others are experiencing changes in behaviour that are similarly disturbing. As Sherriff David Dutton and his deputy, Russell Clank try to determine what is causing the townspeople to go over the deep end in various ways, they are suddenly and mysteriously cut off from the world with no explanation. Joining with his wife and her assistant, Becca Darling (Danielle Panabaker), the group tries to navigate the military’s sudden involvement and survive the nightmare that threatens to tear the town apart.

The plot boils down to thematic qualities inherent in other classics of the horror genre. Less trick than clever filmmaking, this take what you can get relationship puts the viewer in the same spot that the main characters find themselves in. Who is infected and how can we tell?

A few fresh corpses later, all hell breaks loose. Adding to the mayhem is another threat: the gas-mask-wearing, rifle-toting soldiers who have arrived to enforce a quarantine of the entire area. You see, the outbreak was the military’s fault, a plane carrying a biological weapon having crashed and deposited its contents into Ogden Marsh’s water supply some days before.

What with all the crazed Iowans on the loose and the military types corralling and killing the infected and healthy alike, the situation is grave for Sheriff Dutton, his wife and his increasingly twitchy deputy Russell.

The plot is fairly linear and the action rarely strays from our main characters, so this is more functional than anything: it just simply works. Luckily, with the always charismatic Olyphant starring, Eisner gives us a credible lead that never feels out of place and helps convey a sense of what the hell is going on. We immediately connect with the Ogden Marsh sheriff and he finds a nice blend between optimism and sincerity. Olyphant even brings a sense of humor to the table, cracking a few jokes that help break up the uneasiness a bit and keep the film from feeling too heavy. The real standout, though, is Anderson and his role as the deputy. More on edge than anyone in the group and always ready to shoot first and ask questions later, he tightropes the fine line between sanity and craziness without ever jumping off the deep end.

The creatures causing chaos are zombie only in the loosest sense of the word. While not reanimated corpses; they are infected humans that have been twisted mentally with varying results. Significant steps were taken to make sure the infected are not confused with zombies, and the final effect of the eyes and vascularity are rewardingly frightening. There is no hive-mind mentality here or rambling undead moaning and tottering about. Hell, they don’t even eat flesh. They just go crazy, as the title of the film suggests. All that being said, I classify this as a zombie movie simply because there are few other categories that The Crazies can fit into.

The Crazies is not likely to become a classic piece of horror filmmaking, but what it sets out to do it clearly achieves. With an effective cast and an easy to understand plot, Eisner aimed to recreate some of the scares of the classic movies of the horror genre in the ’70s, and manages to pull a lot of the best parts and piece them together to create an entertaining film. Above all else, the film stands out in a time when horror is not necessarily dead, but strays in odd directions and often feels absurd. This isn’t filled with gore and sex prevalent in so many of the horror films of today. Instead, The Crazies relies on suspense and marque acting, creating an apocalyptic thrill ride that makes you wonder if the premise is just crazy enough to become a reality.