The Crazies

Saw The Crazies, a horror. The idea is that a secret government experiment gets out of hand (but don't they always?) and infects a small town with crazy. Specifically, the shamble-around-and-kill-everyone type of crazy. The hero is the sheriff, his doctor wife, his trusty deputy, and some other chick. They do their best to survive in face of the zombie crazy-person hordes and the SWAT teams that have been sent also to kill everyone. There's a lot of tense scenes where pressure builds and there's flickery lights and a single high-pitched note on the soundtrack. Scary, but not very original. Don't get me wrong, I had to keep turning down the volume, tensing for a jump-scare, but then I'm a wimp. You get no points for scaring me.

The film uses a super-efficient government as an omniscient and malevolent god, shaping the landscape and outcome of the story. The small-town values are parodied at various times for the sake of either satire or cruelty. For example, after three hick-ish hunters get infected, they begin hooting and high-fiving over the corpses of humans. This could be a PETA commercial. Walking through a burning town, the quartet hear two mad teenagers giggling as they make a hell of a racket beating a dumpster. Childish exuberance becomes malevolent barbarity.

At one point one of the quartet of heroes self-righteously kills some zombies. The other three regard them with suspicion and hostility, wondering if the virus has infected them (which of course it has. If there's more than one or two people, one of them's getting infected. I don't make these rules.) The passivity and empathy of the heroes is unusual in the zombie genre which, as I've pointed out before, often places heavy value on self-reliance, paranoia, and fortresses. In this film, most zombies are known individuals and the weight of the catastrophe seems to take a visible toll on the heroes.

I'm probably reaching on this last point, but I thought there were a few allusions to WW2 as well. There are several SWAT-run camps where people are herded around and, spoiler, the film ends with a bomb. But there the similarities end. In all the film is interesting but sort of in spite of itself. There are some good scenes (the burning town was really great. In fact, any time there's fire things get good) but a lot more self-indulgent ones (the stupid car wash, the surgical saw goin' for his nuts (wakka-wakka!!))