Let’s meet The Crazies.

There are only 1,200 residents of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, but it’s 100% American soil and all about Main Street. Everyone knows everyone, and local sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his deputy sheriff (Joe Anderson) keep its gravel roads and small businesses in line. On opening day of baseball season, the local drunk wanders onto the field with a strange look in his eye and a shotgun in hand, leaving Dutton no choice but to shoot to kill. He’s got “the crazies,” and soon enough the whole town’s infected. After quarantine, the immune try to escape the massacre but are thwarted by the masses of their crazy – insert ironic giggle here – neighbors.

HELLO? Does this sound like a mixture of Dawn of the Dead/Shawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later? That’s because it is. Mix in what I think the ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening looked like and some gore scenes from the Saw series and you’ve got The Crazies. I’ll give it to director Breck Eisner however, for while The Crazies did have some pitfalls, it wasn’t nearly as horrible as the above mentioned films. The cinematography was well planned out and the horror aspect, attributed to heightened sound effects, worked out well as the other people in the theater screamed! Eisner’s use of close ups and jerky jump cuts intensifies the scenes that really gnaw at your adrenal gland.

A strength of Eisner’s new film that makes it more believable is it gives the audience a sense of reality. The Crazies set design was exactly like a small quiet little town of a thousand people.

The film can be scary on many levels, from its gore Saw-like scenes to it’s underlying message of government secrecy. Eisner and writers Scott Kosar and Ray Wright want us to think that something on par with the Ogden Marsh contamination could easily happen tomorrow…