The Crazies - A Review

Last night, SweetPea and I watched The Crazies.

I was really excited about it because it seemed like it was all the right kinds of bizarre suspense gory thriller. And because SweetPea brought it home as a peace offering for also bringing home The Tooth Fairy and She's Out of My League. And pretty much anything that SweetPea brings home to make something up to me is going to be my kind of horror movie. Because she has a love/hate relationship with them, and usually won't rent them on her own.

Unless they're classics. Or the sad, pathetic C Rated movies. You know. Lower than a B rated movie.

Anyway, my expectations were pretty high for this and, you know, I don't even know why I try anymore.

::DISCLAIMER::

This review will contain spoilers. If you want to be surprised, don't read it. Go watch it, then come read it and then leave me comments with your thoughts. Danni. (heh)

::END DISCLAIMER::

The basic premise of the movie is that the local townspeople start acting strange. Like homicidally strange. There's also some kind of decomposition while alive going on and a certain amount of coming back from the dead. Kind of like zombies, but not.

These types of movies generally go one of two ways:

A slow buildup with character development, buildup of the problem and the main characters working to figure things out or solve the problem.

OR

A rapid buildup where things seem to be normal and then explode in a short amount of time. Not a lot of character development early on and usually not a lot of opportunity for the main characters to start working things out.

The Crazies? The Crazies did neither.

It acted like it was going to have a nice, slow buildup, but just as it started to get into character development and building up the problem, it suddenly exploded into a full blown military concentration camp, sealing off the town nightmare.

The main characters are a young married couple, the town sheriff and the town doctor, his deputy and her assistant. Of course they're all separated at first and of course the men go back for the women and then they go about trying to sneak away from town & the military camp to safety, while trying to avoid the heavily armed military presence and the other escaped crazies.

Oh. And of course the doctor is pregnant.

You figure out pretty early on who will live and who will die. The action doesn't seem to have any specific pace or direction. There are some fairly predictable scares but also some pretty cool gory scenes and explosions.

The ending was so played. I mean... I don't know if people in Hollywood somehow still think this is a new & fresh idea, but the whole "It's over... But is it really over? (dun dun duuunnnnn!)" is seriously played and you can see it coming from a mile away.

Hollywood? Get over it. I really wouldn't mind if a really intense, suspenseful, good horror/thriller flick had a reasonably happy ending. That, you know, ended the movie.

Anyway. The Crazies didn't truly stink up the joint, but it didn't meet my expectations and sort of fell flat.

I'd give it a rating of: Fair to Middling

PS: I think I might be starting a regular movie review on here. You know. As we watch movies. If you think my Internets Radio posts are strange, wait until you get a load of our movie watching choices!