Ol' Jack Burton Goes Crazy with Boredom from Watching THE CRAZIES

Olga Kurylenko has nothing to do with this movie, but she's really hot in Hitman with Timothy Olyphant.

This is Jack Burton in the Pork Chop Express, and I'm talkin' to whoever's listenin' out there.

Well, I’ll just get right to the point. Skip The Crazies. I don’t know why anyone would watch it, to be honest. Nothing in this waste of time is surprising, scary, or interesting. How it’s gotten such good reviews I’ll never know (71% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this writing). I caught this travesty of a zombie/government conspiracy/ human devolution film on Thursday night at midnight with Hombre Lobo and Home Theater Hans. This was HTH’s pick of the night (over Cop Out), and he promptly fell into a post-happy hour slumber while watching it, though Hombre Lobo and I both agreed that this was his type of movie.

While the original 1973 film may have some redeeming qualities simply based on its social/historic context—I have no idea, I’ve never seen it—the remake really doesn’t explore anything new to modern audiences. The main protagonist, Sheriff David Dutton, played by Timothy Olyphant of Hitman and The Girl Next Door fame, confronts the threat of an unknown toxin turning his small town into an ultra-violent group of crazies. Along the way, the government goes overboard in their containment response and the Sheriff, his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson), and his wife’s assistant Becca (Danielle Panabaker, the hot best friend from Sky High) must find their way to safety while avoiding the infected townspeople and the military who kill with extreme prejudice. That’s it. No plot twists, no intimate portraits of human madness or heroics in the face of chaos as in The Mist, or even hokey b-movie-type developments that would at least make this thing entertaining. Nothing new, nothing interesting. Snore.

The performances are mostly as generic as they come, though Joe Anderson’s portrayal of Deputy Russell needs to be applauded. He’s given the meat of the character arc here. In every story, be it written or cinematic or whatever, the point is that a character changes, right? We need to see something interesting happen to them, some kind of revelation or epiphany or evolution/devolution. Something! But the Sheriff and his wife are static. They don’t particularly engage the audience and they’re not really pushed as far as they could be. Russell, however, does. He goes from aw-shucks Barney Fife, to a full-blown, shoot-first badass, to a man confronting his own mortality seamlessly. It feels natural and whenever he’s on the screen, it’s all about him—but not in a fancy, splashy way, his character is more subtle, and completely believable.

So that was the one shining point in the movie. The rest of the movie looks like stock, recycled footage, the scares are lame and elementary (and this is coming from a guy that scares incredibly easy), and frankly, I felt bad that George Romero’s name was anywhere on this piece. The military and government intervention parts didn’t resonate, nor were the crazies themselves particularly horrifying. They were, however, incredibly inconsistent in their portrayal. Some are full-blown nutsos who were completely brain-gone, some were sharp enough to sew peoples’ eyes and mouths closed. What the fuck?

So the cost breakdown:

11.00 on a ticket
4.00 on gas

15.00 wasted on an uneven, completely forgettable film. Till next time, Pork Chop Express is signing off.