THE CRAZIES (2010)

DIRECTOR: Breck Eisner
STARRING: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell

I have a soft spot in my heart for horror. Not blood and guts, but horror — that beautiful buildup of dread. It’s tragic that the genre is as abused as it is, with cheap scares and the new trend of so-called “torture porn.” This is why I became giddy when I saw the trailer for The Crazies. I mean it. I was giddy like a prepubescent girl watching a Hannah Montana music video. It looked like something finally genuine. My experience with the film fulfilled my happy expectations, while simultaneously letting me down.

The Crazies is centered on the sheriff of a small Iowa town, David Dutten (played by Timothy Olyphant). When the locals start to act a bit homicidal, resulting in a remarkable number of deaths, Dutten turns out to be a refreshingly intelligent character and quickly figures out that something is wrong, suspecting that some kind of virus may be contaminating the water supply. As the virus causes the sanity of the town to rapidly collapse and the body count to skyrocket, Dutten and his pregnant doctor wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) and his deputy (Joe Anderson) try to get out of the town alive, all the while having to deal with both “the crazies” and the trigger-happy military, who have been ordered to exterminate all residents of the town in order to contain the epidemic.

Premise-wise, there isn’t much new here to the world of horror. These types of films have been done countless times before. However, what makes The Crazies unique and particularly chilling (at least to me) is how close to home it hits — literally. The tagline of the film is “Fear Thy Neighbor.” As someone who actually did grow up in a small Iowa town, I could put myself in that situation fairly easily: everyone knows everyone else. Imagining friendly, familiar faces that I would see every day suddenly turning vacant and vicious is a terrifying thought. That is what makes the film so effective. This concept is executed disturbingly well in an early scene in which a father becomes infected with the virus and his wife and child pay the price for it.

While the film had its strengths, it did have a few faults that I had hoped it could avoid. I expected too much. Personally, I enjoy horror films which allow the audience to act as a helpless voyeur, i.e. Kubrick’s The Shining; in a lot of recent mainstream horror simply doesn’t have the patience to do this and immediately reverts to the cheap trick of throwing jump scares at the audience whenever possible to secure their constant state of tension. This can be fun, but overall I find it exhausting. The Crazies was very guilty of this — lots of jumps accompanied by loud jarring music. Cut to me, hugging my knees to my chest and lowering my eyes to anticipate it and soften the blow. Not my idea of fun.

Overall, I was satisfied; not nearly as blown away as I would have liked, but good enough.

FINAL GRADE: B