JIM reviews film "THE CRAZIES"

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The Crazies

MY Rating: 6.5 of 10 stars (based on an advance screening of the 101-minute film).

Please Don’t Drink The Water (— OR ELSE!…)

It’s a quiet time in Pierce County, Iowa, as a baseball game is played in the small town of Ogden Marsh (whose population is under 2000 people). All of a sudden, a man enters the outfield carrying a shotgun. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) recognizes the man as being a onetime drunk, & goes out to ask him in a nice way to lower his gun. The man just stares ahead catatonicly, raises the gun— & Timothy feels compelled to shoot him (causing great upset to the man’s wife & son, which comes into play later in the film)…

… Strangely, OTHER people (like a baseball coach) soon start going into similar sort of trances, accompanied by blood flowing from their nose & then followed by horribly VIOLENT acts against others… Timothy & his deputy Russell Clank (Joe Anderson) grow increasingly disturbed by what is happening, & run around trying to confront the strange actions that keep breaking out…

… Timothy’s wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) is a doctor who herself has seen the frightening changes in a number of people, having just examined some who become mixed up in a fire at a farm involving Bill Farnum (Brett Rickaby)…

… Since she’s pregnant, Timothy is especially protective of Radha, and becomes increasingly concerned in his inability to discover just what is CAUSING people to behave like uncontrolled maniacs, altho it seems to be connected to something concerning the water the town has been drinking…

… Instead of things improving, they go from bad to HORRENDOUS, with the sudden arrival of a mass of MILITARY people who round up the townspeople & work to force them to undergo some unexplained tests… They start to engage in some summary executions, and Timothy, Joe, Radha and Becca Darling (Danielle Panabaker) work to escape from the soldiers & try to get somewhere safe…

… Those trying to escape keep running into people who seem to be adversely affected by the mysterious toxin, having to fight from farm to car wash to truck stop with individuals, a group of hunters, and more military people wearing gas-type masks… The confrontations are exceptionally bloody & gory, & certainly not for kids…

… Who are the military people, & what are they trying to “accomplish”?… What is the CAUSE of the sudden violence by people?… WHO will get “AWAY” at the end, & how will they accomplish it?…

… The film has a fine level of TENSION, & would be a quite fascinating “thriller” if is wasn’t so hell-bent on BEING Hell-bent: rather than focus on the environmental disaster impacting the people & the strange over-reaction by the “authorities”, it concentrates on being grotesquely GORY, massively MALIGNANT & violently VICIOUS in the actions of most of the people…

… Some audiences like that level of blood & guts being senselessly spilled; I’d rather they had the guts to NOT be so extreme, & instead concentrated on a better-developed level of more detailed storytelling…

… One friend who saw it commented he was disappointed in the way there was so little real “PLOT” inherent in the film— but, I don’t tend to EXPECT much of that in “slasher” flicks… The ACTING was good by the main characters, & the tense “mood” was effective… But, it could have been so much “MORE” (& simply didn’t care to be, seemingly going for a “lower” un-common denominator)…