Movie Review: The Crazies

Ogden Marsh is Hollywood’s typical snapshot of small-town, Podunk, Midwest America. Located in Iowa, it’s the kind of place where hunting, pickups, farming, the gentle smell of manure and voting Republican are generally the norm. It’s the type of town without strangers, where kids ride bicycles gleefully and without fear down Main Street, and where the entire town shows up to cheer on the high school baseball team. It’s idyllic, old-fashioned and charming. And when The Crazies opens you already know how this film is going to turn out; this Normal Rockwell-esque hamlet is about to get it’s ass kicked.

The Crazies is a remake of a 1973 movie with the same name, written and directed by George Romero, the brains behind Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and most recently, Diary of the Dead (2008). Romero is credited as a writer for the remake and both stories are basically the same: The inhabitants of a small town start going murderously cuckoo, the government barricades the area, and a man and his pregnant wife have to escape both their nutjob neighbors and the conspiring government handymen, dead set on leaving no trace of the mysterious toxin infecting the town’s citizens.

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