There's nothing wrong with The Crazies, Breck (Sahara) Eisner's new remake of an almost-completely-forgotten George Romero quasi-zombie movie of the early Seventies. There are a few pretty cool scenes, some credible acting, and decent production values throughout. The script itself has some real logic problems and fuzzy continuity, but the feeling in general, with more than 0% positive reviews clocking in on Rotten Tomatoes, seems to be, "What the heck? It's just a friggin' zombie movie, dude!"
A minor but mildly interesting thing is that the main characters in this survival-slash-government-paranoia actioner are all salt-of-the-earth Midwestern types; the story takes place entirely in a small Ohio town, population 1,200 and something (think of it this way: they keep talking about escape to the Big City ... of Cedar Rapids). However, not one of the three principals is actually from the continental United States, and two are from much farther away.
Timothy Olyphant, playing the earnest and admirable sheriff in a bad place, is best known as Seth Bullock in HBO's rather amazing series Deadwood, in which he played an earnest and admirable sheriff in a bad place. Tim was born in Hawaii. His wife, the town's doctor, is played by the radiant Radha Mitchell, an Australian actress best known for kicking ass a little more efficiently a few years back in Pitch Black. And the most convincing and 'regional' role in the mix in Joe Anderson, playing Olyphant's deputy Russell. Anderson is British, though he's been hanging around American movie-makers for a while now. He's probably most memorable to Rush-types as one of the ill-fated tourists in The Ruins (but then weren't they all ill-fated?). Only Danielle Panabaker, in a decidedly secondary (and sadly temporary) role, could lay claim to some kind of Midwestern roots -- if you consider Georgia the Midwest. It's just worth nothing that the most convincing, even quintessential "American" roles are taken here by people that are anything but. And they're all actually pretty good. (They all have pretty good horror-movie pedigrees, too: not just Mitchell's Pitch and Anderson's Ruins, but Panabaker was a principle in the remake of Friday the 13th, and even Olyphant did his horror duty, as a major player in The Perfect Getaway earlier this year and in the best-forgotten film version of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher n the fortunately dimmified past. The Crazies opens today, Friday the 25th. You can see one of our editors' take on it over at ScriptPhd, or a different (and far more sarcastic) version here at The Rush, in Contrariwise.
0 comments:
Post a Comment