From the publicity notes to the horror flick “The Crazies”: “a huge step above most movies in this genre” . . . “based in a reality that could happen” . . . “a shoot that was often epic in scope” . . . “the aftermath is like the riots in Los Angeles or Hurricane Katrina” . . . “there are elements built into it that reflect the times we live in” . . . “I can see students sitting in coffee shops all over the country after seeing this picture, saying, ‘What about this?’ I think it has lasting value.”
From my notes to the same movie: “Guy with shotgun blown away in center field during baseball game” . . . “Guy locks up wife and children, sets fire to house” . . . “Bone saw heads for guy’s crotch” . . . “loud horror noise, but it’s only wife tapping her husband on the shoulder” . . . “murderer about to strike down woman, gunshot, guy concealed behind him shot him in the nick of time” . . . “zombie car wash.”
Even for a horror movie, “The Crazies” is a bore, and we’re talking about the most boring genre this side of dysfunctional-family indie drama. A remake of the 1973 movie by George A. Romero, “The Crazies” takes place in a corn-fed heartland where the hayseeds go haywire thanks to a zombiefying poison dumped in their drinking water.
(OK, they’re not technically zombies, just dead-eyed killing machines who wander the landscape intent on murdering anyone in their path, but I’m confident they’d be welcome at any zombie-family picnic.)
A sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and his doctor wife (Radha Mitchell) try to escape the terror and solve the puzzle of why their fellow middle Americans have suddenly gone berserk. To the extent the plot leads anywhere, it’s to a gag about evil military experiments (hardly a comment “on our times”: the device has been a horror staple for decades), but the subject is barely dealt with, even as allegory.
Director Breck Eisner, spawn of Michael (now there’s a horror movie idea — talentless progeny oozing mediocrity across the land), made his debut with “Sahara.” Its fortunes were such that Eisner has been absent from big screens for the intervening five years. But then again, Stanley Kubrick took five years between “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining.” Yes, this is the first paragraph in history to mention both young Eisner and Kubrick.
Eisner’s technique — find a cliché, then pound it in — may scare you out of your wits if you didn’t have a whole lot of them to begin with, but unlike Romero he misses every opportunity for cleverness. How can you do a zombie car wash and not make it even a little funny? Breck Eisner has the answer.
Nor do the characters amount to anything. In an early scene, a potentially interesting question of courage and loyalty arises (“I’ll make a deal with you: You don’t ask why I can’t leave without my wife, and I won’t ask why you can,” says the sheriff to a coward), only to be instantly dropped so we can hurry on to a pitchfork stabbing.
All effort to make the dialogue presentable ceases in the second half, so it’s lucky for you this is the kind of movie that inspires audiences to contribute their own bon mots. “Pop dat fool! Pop him!” cried one citizen at the screening I attended. That line beat most of the chatter up on the screen, which burbled with gosh-we’re-sure-in-trouble talk such as, “You wanna give up? You wanna sit here and die?”
Er, maybe, but only in exchange for the assurance I’ll never have to sit through another Breck Eisner movie.