Zombies in film: The Crazies

"Fear thy neighbor."



Film: The Crazies
Directed by Breck Eisner
Written by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright
Produced by Overture Films, Participant Media and Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ
Year: 2010

Story: Town sheriff, Dave, shoots the town drunk after he pulls out a shotgun during a high school baseball game. Suddenly people start to go crazy all over and kill one another, all hell really breaks loose once the military shows up and starts quarantining everyone. In the chaos, Dave's wife gets taken away for further observation while Dave is led away with the uninfected. In the chaos he manages to get back to her and a small group begin to try to escape the insanity. As the group is whittled away the truth is slowly revealed about bio-weapon that caused the whole event. Finally the military prove their relentless pursuit of mankind's safety in the final scene of the film.

Zombies: Sorry to all the people who told me to watch this film. These are not zombies. Zombies are most often undead. But even getting around that; zombies cannot speak, think, fight, shoot guns, lay traps or make any decisions. These people are more likely fallen pray to something removing their emotional controls, making them prone to obeying their impulses and desires. They also probably have increased hormone and anger-inducing chemicals which puts them into a rage and leads them to murder. Whatever reason, these are not in anyway zombies besides the fact the are led by a virus to kill. The film itself makes no claims to be a zombie film or that the infected are in anyway undead (as many zombie films don't.) I almost want to start a category of "not zombie" movies.

Survival Lessons:

• If the whole town blame you for shooting someone who points a gun at you, something is wrong.
• Kill the psychos now so you don't have to deal with them later.
• Having someone to fight for isn't always a bad thing.
• Marry a bad ass.
• The military will go to any lengths to contain the infection.
• Grunt soldiers know nothing as they will be expendable and expected to be ruthless.
• Car washes are scary places.
• Warned you about those psychos...

Warnings: Below are spoilers.




In the end I enjoyed this movie about as much as I thought I would before people told me it was a zombie movie. I'm pretty good at picking out zombie movies, even from vague trailers or references and I didn't think this was from the start. But once told it was I decided to check it out with a whole different mindset. There are some similar elements and over all it was an enjoyable movie, but not a zombie movie. More then anything though it made me want to see the original by Romero to see if that one was a zombie movie or was similar to this one. This film did not seem to have much of Romero's style to it, too much of a "happy ending" feel to the whole thing.

This will be the first time I really go on about a movie like this but I would like to point out how the heroes of this film are not the sheriff and his wife. The heroes are actually the relentless military. If the military was not to brutal and efficient in it's moves to quickly shut down the infection it would spread across the whole globe very quickly. We can only hope that the military of the real world moves so quickly to contain any threats like this and keep them to a class 3 outbreak or smaller. This movie is one example of many where the bad guys are actually the good guys and the heroes are simply people who managed to survive and gain empathy. Now Dave and Judi as it turns out were not infected. I also disagree with the way the military handled the uninfected at the truck stop. Disagree is even fairly light terms, but on the flip side would I rather the smallest chance the infection get out? Perhaps more tests, bigger surveillance centres, quarantine camps: there are many other ways to deal with the situation then to simply kill everyone who might have come in contact with the virus. Then of course, the nuclear explosion which of course all writer's like to throw in as the military's last resort. At that point have they gone too far over the top? Maybe, perhaps teams of specialists could have swept the area. Or just tried to keep the area locked down until the infection died off. But if the team got infected, or if some nosey kid slipped through the lock down, or a local bad ass sheriff and his wife turn out to not be infected but carriers of the virus? Sometimes as the situation may merit, extremes must be taken for the safety of us all.


Stay vigilant, may the infection never reach you, and those close to you have the resolve to do what is needed should you be so unfortunate, Mike D.