‘The Crazies’: a movie about population control

Joe Anderson (from left), Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell and Danielle Panabaker are the only ones in Ogden Marsh who aren’t crazy

The movie: The Crazies

Based on the 1973 movie by: George A. Romero

Directed by: Breck Eisner

Written by: Scott Kosar and Ray Wright

Actors you may recognize: Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell

Actors you may not recognize: Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker, and a bunch of others.

Past roles of one of the cast members that randomly popped into my head: Timothy Olyphant as the drug pushing Todd in Go; the twenty-something tongue-ringed guy that Carrie sleeps with in the first season of Sex and the City; one of two ghost-face masked killers in Scream 2.

The story: Olyphant plays David Dutton, the sheriff of Ogden Marsh, Iowa. His wife is Judy, the town doctor. All is swell in their quaint town until people start acting crazy (hence the title) which is caused by water contamination which leads to aggressive intervention from military forces dressed in E.T.-like hazmat suits which leads to a bunch of psychopaths with grotesque veiny faces and bloodshot eyes trying to kill everyone else who doesn’t have grotesque veiny faces and bloodshot eyes. Seeing as though Duttons, David’s town deputy (Anderson) and Judy’s office assistant (Panabaker) seem to be the only ones who aren’t infected, they spend the entire movie trying to dodge the nastiness of the crazies. (I’ll give 10 bucks to the people who guess which ones get killed in that quartet).

Jump in seat. Gasp. Laugh. Repeat: This is what you will do throughout the film. It falls into the zombie-chasing category of horror movies. The only difference is that our heroes aren’t running away from mindless, drooling half-dead corpses. They are running away from people who look like a walking STD – and it’s quite fun to watch.

Why do the crazies feel the need to kill? Why can’t they just be nice crazies? Or better yet – why couldn’t the contaminated water turn everyone into idiot savants? It would be like a bunch of Rainmans running around trying to outdo each other with random spurts of ingenious information.

Zombies and infected psychopaths love to harass small towns: Sleepy farm towns tend to be the hot spot for movies that want to illustrate the dangers of infectious viruses and zombies that cause bloody mayhem. Perhaps it’s because they are contained and are like a rural fishbowl – but c’mon – small town citizens from Iowa are people too. There’s no need to have so many southern-fried hicks. Not everyone is like that. Only the majority of them.

A metaphor for population control? Without giving too much away, the purpose of the contamination may be a way for us to think about different ways to manage our country’s population. Hey – if it works, it works, right?

Overall critique: It’s a movie about a band of people trying to escape a city of mindless, disfigured psychopaths ready to kill – it’s fun for the whole family. Grade: B-