Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’m convinced the zombie apocalypse has already happened. And in the midst of all the world-ending, brain-devouring, undead action, the only ones spared were those without any creativity or ingenuity for horror filmmaking. Now we, the movie-going survivors, must endure the harsh reality of a post-apocalyptic world: overabundance of special effects, subpar writing, and remakes. With The Crazies, which opened this past week, Hollywood hit us with the trifecta.
The Crazies is a run-of-the-mill zombie movie, due in no small part to the fact that the original 1973 version was the product of “Father of the Zombie” director George A. Romero. The plot is simple enough: people in a remote Iowa farming town transform one by one from simple, tractor-driving, country-music-listening folk into raging, homicidal psychos. When the government intervenes in attempt to stop the epidemic and fails spectacularly, it’s up to the town’s Sherriff, David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), to get to the root of the problem. With his hot blonde doctor wife (Radha Mitchell) and handlebar-mustachioed deputy (Joe Anderson), he embarks on a subversive mission that leads him to the depraved, malicious villain responsible for the rampant death and destruction—tap water.
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Maybe it’s a marketing tool by Brita. Maybe a ploy by anti-environmentalists who don’t want plastic bottles to go extinct. As Dutton delves deeper into the source of the problem, he discovers that the culprit, as in all good 70s movies, is government incompetence. When a plane carrying an unknown toxin (apparently not labeled with a “CAUTION: VEHICLE OF THE APOCALYPSE INSIDE” sticker) crashed into the podunk town’s water source, government officials decided that rather than get the people out of the deathtrap, they’d just collect them all in an industrial camp and let zombie nature run its course.
If you’ve seen the original Crazies, this probably sounds familiar. If you haven’t, well, this still probably sounds familiar. It’s a typical zombie movie with a typical zombie-movie plot, and despite attempts at differentiating itself, The Crazies still falls into the same formula. The movie tries to rely too much on gore, which has multiplied since the original, and raise its level of shock and horror. But as cool as it is to watch people get impaled on pitchforks, it’s nothing we didn’t see in the last Friday the 13th. Or the one before that.
The main place where this horror film falls flat, though, is in its lack of actual horror. People watch scary movies to bite their nails, scream for the main character not to look behind the door, and wonder where they’re going to hide when the zombie takeover reaches their home. Let’s just say you won’t go home terrified to drink your water after watching The Crazies. Moreover, it’s unclear whether these killers even really count as zombies. They eventually die on their own—after they do some killing, the virus eventually wins. What’s so terrifying about farmers getting a weird strain of the flu?
The zombie apocalypse (I’m telling you, it happened) may have robbed us of our inventive, questionably-sane horror directors, but the real victims were the moviegoers. We’re the ones left to roam the barren wasteland, hoping for a decent movie that’ll make us fear more than just tap water.
