The Crazies

So, I saw The Crazies this weekend.


The film was a remake of a 1973 film written and directed by George Romero, who I continue to like more and more, despite his dive in making quality films as of recently.

You can see the difference in movie posters. They just don't make them like they used to. I think I want to start collecting George Romero movie posters.

The Crazies takes place in a little town of about 1200 people called Ogden Marsh, Iowa. Being from a town of about 3000 people called Ogden, Iowa, I was naturally drawn to this film. The interesting thing is that, apparently, the small-town-Iowa thing drew a whole crowd for this film that I would have never expected. I see horror movies. I love them and I would like to some day write horror movie screenplays. That being said, I have been in the theater for movies like this since I was old enough to buy tickets for them (or clever enough to figure out how to sneak in).

I have never seen a theater this full for a movie like this in all my experiences of seeing zombie-infection films of this type. I'm pretty sure a showing of Cop Out was playing at the same time that The Crazies was and it felt like the general audience of this movie would have been much more at home laughing at the laugh-out-loud, police brutality humor of that film, rather than loving the ridiculous details of a quarantined infection in a small Iowa town gone wrong. I mention this with no elitist tone. I simply use it to question whether or not the name-dropping of Cedar Rapids and the Iowa Hawkeyes in a film is enough to make the casual viewer want to see it.




Overall, I liked the film. I'm not sure if this is because my horror movie standards have been lowered after years of bad horror or if because this was one of the rare cases when a horror remake is done pretty well (Rob Zombie, please stop making movies).

As the story goes, a plane carrying some toxic substance crashes into a small body of water that the town of Ogden Marsh gets its water from. Slowly, members of the town start to go crazy as they use the water, and the American government steps in to quarantine the area to prevent the spread of this "crazy" infection. Surprisingly, the Iowa setting allowed for some pretty nice landscape shots, which made Iowa look as beautiful as it does during its best summer nights, throughout the whole film. Ironically, the majority of the film was shot in Georgia, because, apparently, the filmmakers wanted the state to look prettier than they actually thought it was.

I liked it enough to want to see the original (sometimes known as Code Name: Trixie), but because every good movie rental place in Ames is tanking, I decided I finally need to open my own Netflix account to get access to the kinds of films that the shelves of Family Video do not offer.