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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Rating the 2010 Super Bowl Trailers

Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints on winning Super Bowl XLIV in what may have been the most boring NFL championship since, well, the last time the Indianapolis Colts went to the Super Bowl in 2007. And while I love football as much as the next dude, I won’t lie – I anticipate the commercial breaks in the hope I’ll see some genius advertising or some phenomenal movie preview.

This year’s commercials and trailers were ho-hum, except for the Google “Search On” ad (who thought you could tell a love story using a search engine in less than a minute?), the Doritos “House Rules” commercial and the Careerbuilder.com “Casual Friday” spot, the rest were either bizarre, unfunny or beyond stale (Bud Light, I’m talking to you).  Even more glaring was the absence of trailers for Iron Man 2, The A-Team, Clash of the Titans, Toy Story 3, Shrek Forever After, Despicable Me and Tron: Legacy.

Here’s a rundown of the movie trailers shown during Super Bowl XLIV. Click the movie name to watch the preview.

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Trailer Tuesday: The Crazies

The Crazies, a remake of George A. Romero’s (Night of The Living Dead) 1973  cult classic of the same name, hits theaters on February 26, 2010 and is directed by Breck Eisner, whose last film was 2005′s dreadful Sahara. Romero’s original pooped out at the box-office and something tells me Eisner’s version, starring Timothy Olyphant (A Perfect Getaway) and Radha Mitchell (Surrogates), won’t turn heads or produce cartwheels either. But that’s okay, because for now we can enjoy this succulent trailer and laugh at both Mitchell and Olyphant, as they have both starred in craptastic video game moves, namely Silent Hill and Hitman.

As you can see from the trailer, the plot seems pretty simple: Some Midwest town is infected with a virus that turns people from good, peaceful, God-fearing churchgoers, to homicidal maniacs hell-bent on killing. Basically, the whole idea of zombies, just without the undead part. Somehow the government is involved and they show up unannounced and start shooting infected townspeople.

Despite my loathing of the horror remake and my loathing of Sahara, this movie, based on the trailer, looks like it could be pretty creepy. What are your thoughts?