Maybe Sundays - The Crazies (2010)

The Crazies (2010, dir. Breck Eisner)
Starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Danielle Panabaker, Joe Anderson

The Crazies is only a zombie film by default. It's "monsters" aren't the walking dead at all, but people infected by viral weapons designed by the United States military. And one could easily debate if the villains in the film are the townsfolk or the emergency response military troops that come to kill them all. Based on a 1973 George Romero cult flick, this film follows the same premise but with some modern tweaks and a lot better character development than the original.

The story begins with Ogden Marsh Sheriff David Dutton attending the opening game of the high school baseball season. A town farmer arrives on the field, behaving strangely and brandishing a shotgun. David to shoot and kill the man when he draws his weapon on the crowd. Over the next day, more cases of similar behavior surface causing David and his doctor wife, Judy to suspect something sinister is at work. In the middle of the night military forces show up in Ogden Marsh, rounding up citizens in makeshift internment camps.

It's obvious the film is expanding on the anti-government paranoia of the 1970s with a post 9-11 spin. What I picked up on most was that almost every infected townsperson is a familiar face that we're allowed to pick up some details about before they become a monster in the film. With the military, we only see one soldier's face. The rest are constantly wearing hazmat suits or full fatigues with gas masks securely planted over their faces. This conceit causes the military to come off as much more of the mysterious evil force than the infected. In fact, the greatest horror of the film is performed by the military in the film's finale.

Despite this, the film falls into the most cliched of cliches in the horror business. There was an inordinate number of times where we were given a cheap jump scare from someone being touched on the shoulder. And I counted at least twice where a scare was revealed by the camera simply panning to the right to reveal an infected in the room. It's these easy paint-by-the-numbers techniques that take a film, which could have been interesting and tapped into some interesting zeitgeist, and turn it into a $5 DVD bin flick for Wal-Mart.