The Crazies

Be grateful that Breck Eisner's brain-dead remake of George Romero's "The Crazies" (1973) runs a meager 101 minutes. That means less time robbed from of your life when you could be doing any number of more interesting things, like watching popcorn pop, or counting sheep. Romero's fourth film was his favorite, though it bombed with critics and audiences, mostly due to lousy marketing and the mistaken assumption that it was just another version of "Night of the Living Dead." How sad, then, that the master not only executive-produced but wrote this monumentally dumb, dull remake. Even on the level of killer-virus-gone-wild gore-fest, "The Crazies" as rejiggered by Eisner ("Sahara") is a dud.

Primarily what makes it such a stinker is its simplemindedness, the packaging of any idea or location or event or character or shot into something guaranteed not to challenge viewers with complexity. Bereft of talent or vision, Eisner reduces Romero's apocalyptic juggernaut to tinker toy. (Rumored to be planning a remake of David Cronenberg's "The Brood," Eisner should be permanently barred from the director's chair.)

Romero opened "The Crazies" with a bang: a farmer, inexplicably become affectless monster, butchers his wife and burns down his home, kids still inside. You're instantly immersed in horror, any sense of ordinary reality totally shattered. The remake opens with a cliché: Main Street ablaze, full of wrecked cars and debris, followed by a cut to bucolic farm country labeled "Two days earlier." This is the equivalent of horror movie advertising, a snapshot of bad stuff to come. It's an announcement, in cinematic baby talk -- the antithesis of a movie reaching out and dragging you into horrific drama.

Seems a military plane has crashed near the small town of Ogden Marsh, contaminating the water supply in this pleasant little farming community with a nasty virus that drives people crazy and causes bleeding from various orifices. First sign of something gone terribly wrong occurs during a baseball game attended by half the town. Suddenly, an expressionless fellow toting a shotgun shambles purposefully out on the field. The sheriff (Timothy Olyphant of "A Perfect Getaway" and HBO's "Deadwood") tries to talk down the guy (apparently drunk, really the first of the crazies) but is forced to shoot him dead. You'd expect such a weird, unexpected invasion of everyday reality to raise a few goose bumps, but the scene plays out perfunctorily with no authentic shock, just the jaded recognition of a familiar horror-movie trope.

Everything in Romero's low-budget original was raw, a visceral assault. The Pennsylvania setting felt authentic: woods, fields, farmhouses and back roads places you might glimpse on the breaking news. The remake lacks a genuine sense of place or geography, so the intrusion of fatal virus and faceless soldiers doesn't have up-close-and-personal impact. Romero filled his rural evenings with the reassuring sounds of crickets and tree frogs, further heightening the horror of the "ghosts" (men in white bio-hazard suits) who begin to haunt the night. Eisner resorts, with metronomic regularity, to "scary" music, with blasts of sound to cue you that something is about to make you jump. If it works once, keep doing it.

What does it mean to be crazy in this cautionary tale about biological warfare? In Romero's version, the impulses and fears that civilized life requires us to suppress can no longer be censored, so what his "crazies" act out delivers a psychological punch. An overly protective father commits incest with his daughter; the hero's best friend can contain neither his sexual jealousy nor his envy of his Vietnam buddy's military success. In the remake the complexity of relationships and repression gets pretty literal-minded: rabid hunters take to stalking human beings; the sheriff's deputy refuses to take orders.

Consider the appalling and moving death of an infected girl in the original film. Like some flower child she dances within a ring of soldiers, inviting them to play with her. Freaked out by her crazy innocence, they open fire. The remake substitutes the mechanical execution of a mother and her son at disengaging distance. Their ensuing incineration seems less an outrage than an opportunity for a prurient close-up of charred remains. That's typical. By means of a series of separate set-pieces (in funeral home, nursery, truck stop), the new "Crazies" racks up body count and buckets of blood, hoping to emulate the real shock of a town-killing movie like "30 Days of Night."

Shockingly prescient about bio-terrorism, "The Crazies" No. 1 delivered a nuanced reading of the careless impotence of science and the military alike, which still rings true in light of Hurricane Katrina and our adventures overseas. Romero's downbeat ending wasn't popular, but it courageously kept faith with the tone of his film, chronicling the probable demise of civilization. Climaxing with a big bang, the new version mostly aims for easy, black-and-white targets: soldiers are mostly masked killers; and aerial surveillance screens, clicking from close-up to god's-eye views, suggest the presence of Big Brother watching from the air as well as listening in on tapped phone lines. But Eisner fails to invest these "villains" with real power. They don't inspire paranoia or hatred or terror; they're just straw men (and screens) existing only to advance the plot, not to lend weight and significance to what happens to the hapless citizens of Ogden Marsh, or any other "infected" community.

Do I really need to spell it out? Four stars for "The Crazies" by George Romero. Rent it.

Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.