So the Winter Olympics ended last night, with their tasteful closing ceremonies.With painful memories of the opening ceremonies still causing me migraines, I decided to opt out of the festivites.
No, I chose to watch "The Crazies", instead. Woe is me.
Let me speak, if I may, about George A. Romero's original, classic "The Crazies".
Five years after Romero directed the first, the best, the definitive zombie masterpiece in "Night of the Living Dead", the young and gifted director took a rough screenplay by Paul McCollough called "The Mad People", and reworked it into an amazing, micro-budget cult classic called "The Crazies".
Romero's film followed a small band of survivors trying to survive in the aftermath of the accidental release of a government bioweapon code-named "Trixie", which causes people to... well, act fucking crazy.
And not "I'm gonna pull my dick out in front of a group of 2nd Graders visiting the Natural History Museum" crazy. I'm talking "I'm gonna pull my dick out in front of a group of 2nd Graders visiting the Natural History Museum, after I decapitate them with a rusty shovel and smear their blood all over my sweating, expectant flesh" crazy.
"Gary Busey" crazy.
These survivors consist of a fire fighter named David, his pregnant wife, his firefighter friend named Clank, and a sweaty douchebag father named Artie with his kooky daughter. This motley crew unites in an attempt to get the fuck out of Dodge- I mean Evans City, Pennsylvania, before either the military or the depraved infected motherfuckers kill them.
While this is going on, we also follow the efforts of the U.S. government to contain the virus, led by Colonel Peckam, and military scientist Watts's attempts to develop a cure for "Trixie", before the situation spirals completely out of control.
At one point, our five survivors hide out in an abandoned house. Sweaty daddy Artie, practically dripping "Trixie" from his oily pores, decides now is a fantastic time to have sex with his sexy jailbait daughter.
This is hardly a surprise, because Artie has wanted to bang his daughter for a while now. He wouldn't let her date. he wanted her all to himself. "Trixie" just made this sleazy prick drop his inhibitions.
Oddly enough, his daughter doesn't seem terribly offended by the idea, at least at first, but she was out of her fucking gourd before the world started falling apart, and she's obviously infected at this point, as well. So who knows? Maybe this is what these two lovebirds always wanted.
Either way, this scene is a little hard to watch.
Clank bursts in, beating seven shades of shit out of Captain Incest, and his lovely daughter wanders outside, only to get ventilated by some heavily armed soldiers.
Artie hangs himself, I guess because he felt guilty for boning his only child.
Clank goes out in a hail of bullets, and it sucks because you like Clank. But it is a George A. Romero movie, so you don't expect things to end well.
David's wife, showing signs of infection, gets blasted all to Hell. David has just lost everything. His beloved wife and unborn child have just been destroyed before his eyes, and it's a pretty painful thing to see.
Actor Will MacMillan, who plays David, while not being the most attractive leading man, really sells the moments in this film. And when he loses his family, you can see the pain in his eyes. I just wanted to give the guy a hug.
By now, David has realized that while everyone around him has succumbed to "the crazies", he has remained healthy. He seems to be immune to "Trixie", but doesn't bother to tell this to the soliders when he surrenders to them.
Why the fuck should he? His sole reason for surviving has been obliterated by these trigger happy assholes. Let it all burn. David's checking out.
Meanwhile, Dr. Watts has discovered a cure. This super genius has come up with a cure for "Trixie" in less than 48 hours, with the bare minimum of resources provided by his government, in the middle of a hot zone filled with armed lunatics.
His superiors treat him like dogshit throughout the film, at one point even threatening to kill the poor bastard for doing his fucking job. And still, Watts pulls a miracle out of his flabby ass, ready to spread the good news and save the god damned day.
Seriously, give this man a medal. No, give this man a thousand medals, his own island, and a harem populated with actresses from Russ Meyer's bouyant ouvre. He's earned it.
When Dr. Watts rushes out with his cure, trying to find his superiors, he's mistaken for one of the infected by the utterly retarded soldiers, and shuttled off to the quarantined local high school with the rest of "the crazies".
His cure gets smashed to bits, along with the good doctor himself, when he's pushed down a flight of stairs at the school by the infected. So this poor, poor son of a bitch dies, and with him perhaps mankind's only hope of containing "Trixie", because soldiers are fucking assholes.
This is a recurring theme in Romero's films, authority figures as clueless and/or dangerous figures. Just look at the hillbilly posse in "Night of the Living Dead", Cousin Cuda in "Martin", Captain 'Greek Salad' Rhodes in "Day of the Dead", or any cop in "Knightriders".
Maybe a 4-Star general fondled George when he was a school boy.
The film ends with Colonel Peckam boarding a chopper and leaving Evans City under orders, en route to another city showing signs of "Trixie" infection. The situation has officially spiraled out of government control.
I love this movie. With a passion. I first watched this film when Blue Underground released it on DVD in 2003. I was already a huge Romero fan, so this purchase was a no-brainer. But I was floored with just how much I enjoyed it. I watched it on three consecutive nights, and just loved it more and more.
I can't recommend this movie enough to people. It's oozing with apocalyptic dread. There are a few unforgettable kills, and some disturbingly realistic violence.
It features truly memorable performances by Richard Liberty (who later went on to play the immortal Dr. Logan in "Day of the Dead") as sleazy daddy "Artie", Lynn Lowry (who later appeared in David Cronenberg's "Shivers" as the naughty Nurse Forsythe) as loony daughter Kathy, and Lloyd Hollar (who later appeared on "One Life To Live") as the conflicted Colonel Peckam.
Watch George A. Romero's "The Crazies". You will not regret it.
Do not watch Breck Eisner's remake of "The Crazies". Don't you fucking dare.
There's a fella named David. He has a pregnant wife. He has a friend named Clank. A bioweapon is introduced into a small town's water supply after a government aircraft crashes in the area. And the government invades in an effort to contain the infection.
That is where the similarities end.
Welcome to Ogden Marsh, Iowa. It's a pleasant place, populated with friendly faces. And that all goes tits up after folks start drinking the water and acting... kinda like zombies, actually.
Some of them, anyway. They get all veiny, and their eyes turn yellow, and they screech like the rage-infected bastards in "28 Days Later". Most of them just act like this, screaming and clawing and drooling and being annoying.
Every now and then, they'll act a little like the infected from Romero's movie, making a trap, or tying somebody up, or singing a stupid song while they ride a fancy bicycle around the deserted streets of Ogden Marsh, Iowa (A nice cameo by Lyyn Lowry, riding directly out of Romero's superior original. Her version of "crazy" has no place in this movie.)
Honestly, the name of this town is shoved down my throat 20 times in the first 20 minutes of the film. It's on banners, on signs, on stationery, on t-shirts...
I fucking get it! The town's name is Ogden Marsh! It's a Lovecraft reference! You're not that fucking clever!
Some infected douche burns down his farm house, killing his wife and child who are trapped in a closet. You can tell he's infected because he stands around, empty-eyed, acting like he's downed a fistfull of Valium.
Another medicated prick wanders out onto a high school baseball diamond, interrupting the game, holding a shotgun and just standing around. Our hero, Sheriff David Dutton, is forced to shoot the staring wonder in front of all the poor kiddies.
The dead man's wife and teenage son blame the Sherrif for the man's death, while the Sherrif blames the booze, because this fella was a notorious drunk back in the day.
But wait! the post-mortem toxicology report comes back negative! He was sober when the Sheriff shot him in the face. The plot thickens!
No, it doesn't. We all know the dead fuck had "the bug". So there's no tension. We're just waiting for the movie to catch up to us, at this point. This wouldn't be a problem if the movie were particularly entertaining or suspenseful. But it isn't. Unless Breck Eisner thinks that needless jump scares build tension and suspense.
He probably does, because he's an idiot.
Some rednecks, out doing some illegal off-season hunting, find the corpse of a pilot in a swamp, and report it to the Sherrif. Our intrepid hero and his trusty sidekick, Deputy Clank, go out into the swamp, and discover a submerged plane in the nearby river.
I don't know how a military plane goes down near any populated area in this country without any locals seeing or hearing anything, but there it is.
Eventually, Sherrif Dutton figures out that something in that plane is in the drinking water, and it's making people sick. So he goes to tell the mayor, arguing that the town's water system needs to be shut down to save the citizens.
The mayor, played by "ER"'s John Aylward in a pointless cameo, is introduced swimming in his pool, bloated and pissed off. He tells the Sheriff that turning off the water means no water for the crops. That means that the town's economy will collapse! Disaster!
So no, dumbass, nobody's turning off the water! Dr. Anspaugh has spoken!
So obviously, the next scene shows Sherrif Dutton breaking into the water tower, shutting off the system and saving the day. Right?
WRONG!
It's far too late to save Ogden Marsh, Iowa. Half the population is infected, acting craaaazy, and the other half is being ferried away by armed government soldiers, evacuating the uninfected to a nearby truckstop, where they will presumably be removed from the area altogether.
The Sherrif's pregnant doctor wife, who was already running a fever before this business started, is removed from her husband's arms and taken to the high school to be quarantined with the infected.
You can see where things are going from here.
While Sheriff Dutton and Deputy Clank are on their way to the high school, pregnant Judy Dutton is tied to a gurney in a room filled with infected boys and girls also tied to theirgurnies. Enter Prinicpal Sandborn, played by Larry Cedar, infected as shit and dragging a pitchfork.
I will always remember Larry Cedar as nerdy agent-in-training Howard Butz in "Feds". He's the poor fella who got stationed in Duluth at the end of the film, while Rebecca De Mornay and Mary Gross were stationed in Los Angeles.
How the fuck did Mary Gross have a career? She's not particularly funny, which I would consider a rather important matter for a so-called "comedic actress". Her face looks like a collapsed soufflé. And her voice is like nails on an ugly chalkboard.
I remember her nightmarish portrayal of Alfalfa opposite Eddie Murphy's brilliant Buckwheat on "Saturday Night Live" back in 1984. I was a young child, and her freakish performance scarred me for life.
I would cower in fear under my sheets, terrified that Alfalfa might be under my bed, ready to drag me into the Dead Lights. Thanks, Mary Gross!
Where was I?
The Sheriff saves his wife, along with some random young lady played by Danielle Panabaker. blasting Principal Duluth into the Infinite. Infected people try to kill them. Soldiers try to kill them. They get trapped in a carwash fleeing from an attack helicopter, and are immediately besieged by the infected. Panabaker gets dragged out of the Sheriff's car, dangling by her throat from a cable.
The Sheriff and Deputy Clank get Panabaker down from the cable in maybe 30 seconds, but the young lady who was screaming and flailing about literally five seconds before, is now very dead.
You can tell because Doctor Judy Dutton does not even attempt to perform CPR on the young lady. This makes perfect sense, of course. Doctors never attempt to save lives, after all. That way lies madness.
Our quartet now reduced to a Power Trio, they make their way back to the Sheriff's house to retrieve his old police cruiser, their previous ride having been destroyed by the previously mentioned attack helicopter.
I may be misremembering some of the details, here. Perhaps the car that was destroyed was the old cruiser, and this scene happened after the sequence at the Sheriff's house...
No, that can't be right. Shit, it doesn't matter, anyway. Moving on!
Judy fiddles with the laundry drying on the clothesline, saying something stupid, then she wanders into the house to gaze longingly at the baby crib in the nursery that they never got to use.
The Sheriff follows her into the nursery, maybe one minute later, to find his wife tied up in a fucking chair, flanked by the now clearly infected wife and son of the town drunk he murdered during the opening minutes of the film.
How these two infected fucks managed to professionally tie Judy up in less than a minute boggles my mind. But that's neither here nor there.
The son tackles Sheriff Dutton, holding a rope around his throat. He reaches for his gun, but his hand is nailed to the floor by a knife, courtesy of Big Bad Momma.
The Sheriff says some bad words to get Momma's attention, before removing his hand from the floor, with the knife still jutting out of his bleeding palm, planting the blade in her throat.
Did I mention that the blade is still in his hand? So he's got his hand wrapped around her neck, the knife blade embedded in her throat. There's all kinds of bodily fluid exchange going on, here.
So he's gotta be infected, right? Right?
It doesn't matter. The virus follows no conventional rules. People get infected when it's convenient to the plot, and that's it. It's fucking insulting.
Now maybe Sheriff Dutton was supposed to be immune, like in the original, but nobody ever mentions this possibility at any point in the film, so I discount it, outright.
After Dutton throat-shanks the Vengeance Mother, Deputy Clank manages to shoot her son, the Angry Young Man from outside the house, through the second-floor window, saving his friends. Lucky shot? Nope. Clank's just good.
The Sheriff, Judy and Deputy Clank get the old cruiser running, and they head out on the open road, shortly after the Sheriff makes a point to tell his wife that the military is watching every road, implying that travel on the roads is unsafe. Whatever.
Also, for some reason, these people are still heading for the truck stop where the military is supposedly evacuating folks.
Why? You can go ANYWHERE ELSE!!! Anywhere away from the high military presence!
You are officially the stupidest people I have seen in a movie since the entire cast of "Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen"! Congratu-fucking-lations!
Clank loses his shit, because the plot demands he become infected, and he runs on a military roadblack, sacrificing his life to provide a diversion, allowing Sheriff Dutton and Judy to get past, on their way to the fucking truck stop.
Clank is played by Joe Anderson, by the way. Anderson played Mathias, the poor German guy who got his legs amputated in "The Ruins". His character in this movie is really the best part. He manages to be funny on occassion, he's handy with a rifle, and he sports an awesome moustache.
So of course he has to die. Leave us alone with bland Timothy "I loved you in that big battle at the end of 'Return of the King'" Olyphant, and Radha "Scream incoherently all the time" Mitchell.
Good work, Breck Eisner.
Anyway, these two goons get to the truck stop and discover that the military killed everyone they evacuated from Ogden Marsh, Iowa, in an attempt to contain the infection. Obviously, these government guys aren't taking any chances.
They decide to steal a truck and promptly get attacked by the rednecks from earlier in the film, now all "crazies" with the yellow eyes and pronounced veins. The rednecks are dispatched, our heroes outrun a NUCLEAR FUCKING EXPLOSION, which unfortunately wrecks the truck.
So the Sheriff, showing no signs of infection, I might add, and his pregnant wife, are walking on foot, approaching Cedar Rapids, Iowa, finally safe.
Not so fast, suckaz! A spy satellite is tracking you two! And the military is already initiating containment protocols in Cedar Rapids, all thanks to you!
How many people must suffer because you stubbornly refuse to die?!
Fuck this movie, man.
And fuck Breck Eisner, too!
This devil spawn of Michael Eisner, A.K.A. "The Man Who Ruined Disney For A Generation", directed a piss-poor excuse for a horror movie. No genuine tension in your script? No problem! Just fill the movie with pointless jump scares! Nothing original in your story? Don't worry! Just rip off other, better horror movies!
I mean, Zack Snyder opened his entertaining remake of "Dawn of the Dead" with a Johnny Cash song, right? So let's open our remake of "The Crazies" with a Johnny Cash song, too! And we'll up the ante by closing our remake with another Johnny Cash song! That's fucking brilliant!
But what else can you expect from Breck Eisner? After all, the man directed "Sahara", the most boring adventure movie you will ever see.
Don't see this movie, Dear Imaginary Reader. Don't watch it in theatres, don't rent it through Netflix, don't watch it on cable. Just watch Romero's original film, and enrich yourself.
Hell, go rent "Feds". As lame as it may be, you will enjoy it more than this garbage. At least Rebecca De Mornay was hot back in 1988.
Ah, screw it. Rent "And God Created Woman", Roger Vadim's 1988 remake of his own 1956 film, because De Mornay gets naked in it.
Or just rent the original, because Brigitte Bardot is sexier.
Hey, I got another comment!
"Stephanie" left a lovely comment concerning a previous entry, "Darkon Island". Thanks for the feedback, "Stephanie", and I apologize to you for stumbling across my deranged little corner of the internet.
I also apologize for the length of this blog entry. Things got out of hand.
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