Been there, killed that

PHOTO BY PHOTO BY SAEED ADYANI; COURTESY OF OVERTURE FILMS

THE CRAZIES

Where is it playing?: Park, Stadium 10

What's it rated?: R

What's it worth?: $6.50 (Steve)

What's it worth?: $4.00 (Glen)



In yet another foray into zombiesque mania, The Crazies brings its own peculiar twist to the genre when the residents of a small Iowa town start going berserk due to contaminants in the water supply. Only four of the town’s residents seem unaffected, including sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his wife (Radha Mitchell). The four survivors band together to fight off the homicidal maniacs who want them dead. (101 min.)

Glen Zombies are so five minutes ago, but that didn’t stop Breck Eisner from updating George A. Romero’s 1973 film about a military-grade bio-weapon accidentally dropped into the water supply of a small town. What starts as a fairly promising story quickly devolves into your standard-issue sci-fi horror flick: government conspiracy, rampaging psychotics, and a small band of people struggling to survive who begin to turn on each other (are they sick, too?). These are ideas mixed and matched and co-opted by such recent films as Resident Evil, 30 Days of Night, and 28 Days Later, but they’re old as The Hills Have Eyes (pun totally intended). The problem with The Crazies is after a promising opening it becomes predictable and boring.

Steve I think the next zombie movie should be based solely on kittens becoming the undead. They could meow, purr, sit in the laps of the unsuspecting, then rip open necks and chow down on people meat. The dialogue obviously would be very minimal, so it could be the most original and cheapest zombie movie since the one the New Times staff made last year! Seriously, The Crazies is yet another one of those middling, competent films that does what it’s meant to do well. It has plenty of predictable moments, but it also has plenty of tension.

Glen Luckily I like Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, both good actors without whom this film would have flopped. But even they can’t prop up the final third, which resorts to nonsense. The first people infected become mute, violent zombies, but by the last third, we’ve got a talking mother-son zombie team  out for revenge on Olyphant’s character, and then  three redneck hunters work together to hunt people. I guess we’re to assume the bio-weapon works differently on different people, but I can’t help but think the screenwriters simply couldn’t sustain the premise and were forced to break their own rules. And don’t even get me started on the stupid ending, which like the Resident Evil series seems hell-bent on setting up an endless series of rehashes. The Crazies is a perfectly mediocre zombie flick, worth seeing in the theater if you’re a zombie junkie, worth renting if you’ve got disposable income and time, and worth ignoring completely if you’ve got better things to do.

Steve Ah, yes, Olyphant. He will always be an actor-god to me because of the ‘crazily’ awesome Deadwood series he starred in. Fortunately, his Deadwood character didn’t bleed too much into his sheriff character here. There was one part where Olyphant’s character talks about how hard it will be to get back into town to rescue his wife and then all of a sudden he’s smack back in the middle of town. Bad editing? Definitely, but not as bad as the editing in the new New Times movie that’s coming out soon. Seems as though the famous Techno Viking from YouTube makes an appearance as one of the three backwoods fellows who fell outta Deliverance into this here zombie land. By the way, if it seems like though we have given away too much of the movie already, you obviously haven’t seen the previews where practically the whole plot was revealed. It’s too bad it ends the way it does; there should be more movies where everyone simply dies—like in this other zombie movie I just watched this weekend called Dead Snow. Which zombie flick was better? More or less a tie, I think, although Dead Snow is a Netflix download so it was cheaper! 

Glen Already shilling for our annual New Times movie, eh, Miller? This one—There’s Something About Murray—promises to be the dumbest one yet, in which we try to lure Bill Murray to the SLO International Film Festival. Look, people, if you want to see the sickest horror flick ever made, may I direct you to Cannibal Holocaust, a film so depraved that the 95 minute original version is only available as an underground bootleg since it was banned in its native Italy and the only “officially” released U.S. version is the 90-minute animal cruelty-free cut of the film. Too bad Insomniac Video closed down since it had a VHS copy of the original full-length version, in which a coatimundi (looks like a muskrat), a turtle, a snake, a tarantula, a spider monkey, and a pig are all slaughtered live on film, plus they cut off a guy’s penis in a scene so realistic you’ll swear it was real. In fact, rumors swirled that people were actually killed in the movie—a real life snuff film! Thankfully untrue! Still, it’s sick—the kind of film you never want to see twice, like Faces of Death. It makes The Crazies look like Bambi.

Steve I was definitely not impressed or sickened by Cannibal Holocaust, although granted I only vaguely remember seeing it in the first place. If you really want to see sick, watch Irreversible (2002), which is one movie I wish I had never seen. But back on topic: If zombie or zombieish movies are your thing, The Crazies is definitely worth seeing at least at a matinee. Next week, we’ll finish our triumvirate of “crazy” people movies by seeing the new Alice in Wonderland! Until then, stay sane!

Glen Starkey is a New Times staff writer and Steve Miller is New Times’ staff photographer. Comment at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com and semiller@newtimesslo.com.