the Informer

Which is a more frightening antagonist in a horror movie: A town’s worth of insane citizens armed with weapons and a killer instinct, or the American military?

The only reason I ask is because I was equally scared by both groups when I watched “The Crazies.” Sure, the blood-soaked, bug-eyed village community that wanted to murder everything in sight was pretty scary, but so were the gas-masked, dispassionate, flamethrower wielding military members who seemed to have the same goal as the crazies themselves.

The main characters spent equal amounts of time running from the military as they did running from the crazies, and at times, I couldn’t even tell who I should be more worried about (despite the movie being called “The Crazies”).
The movie started out promising enough: it jumped right into the premise and the action, giving us little backstory about the citizens, but I preferred it that way.

We were briefly introduced to the handsome sheriff of the town David (Timothy Olyphant) and his pretty wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), who is the doctor of the town and is pregnant. Almost immediately after we see them, the story moves onto a town baseball game gone awry when the town drunk stumbles onto the field with a shotgun.

After he is dealt with by David, we learn from his autopsy that he, in fact, was 100 percent sober when he stumbled onto field, beginning the confusion about what is happening within this small town, aside from having a town drunk who is not very good at his job.

To sum it up, the town starts to go mad and tear itself apart from the insane citizens, and it soon becomes a war of the normal people and those who want to ruthlessly hunt them down in the most lethal manner possible with standard farming equipment.

Naturally, the government intervenes, and here’s where things get ugly: instead of trying to help protect the normal people in the town from the Crazies, the gas-masked, heavily armed government shock troops have orders to just destroy everything and everyone and pretend like this never happened. Because America will turn a blind eye to an entire town of 1,000 or so people disappearing.

This is what bothers me about these types of horror/suspense movies. I just want to see a movie where crazy townfolk tear each other apart, since that’s what “The Crazies” was billed as.

I don’t need an anti-governmental “hidden” message to go along with it, and that’s exactly what I was feeling when I watched it. “28 Weeks Later” was another good horror movie with another unnecessary political message to go along with it, since the American military in that movie also gave up on trying to save the citizens it was supposed to be protecting and just firebombed everything and called it a day.

But with all things considered, “The Crazies” was still a legitimate horror movie, and it did pack in quite a few scares. The scary parts in the movie were mostly all “boo” moments, where the insane citizen jumped in the middle of the screen from nowhere with sudden orchestral chords raging in the background; your standard horror genre tactic.

If this is the kind of thing you go to see horror movies for, then I would recommend this movie to you. I’m usually more impressed by the slow-building horror that leads to a tense and climatic scene, and there were a couple of these in “The Crazies” but it was mostly dominated by the “boo” moments. I’m also glad that Olyphant and Mitchell played accurate roles of scared and confused, yet level-headed citizens during the rampage.

The characters weren’t too idiotic and contrived as they usually feel during most horror movies. And the dialogue wasn’t overly lame and groan-inducing, as it tends to be during this genre of film.

So while I’m more or less impressed that “The Crazies” didn’t fall into the pitfalls of most modern horror films, there were still quite a few issues that kept me from really enjoying it as a horror film, like its dependence on “boo” moments for scares, and the director’s apparent paranoia that the government is out to hurt us, not help us. It could have been a successfully scary and honorable remake of the 1973 movie, but since it just felt like another horror movie, I’ll give it a B.