A Review of the Crazies

The Crazies Review

The Crazies is a movie with a sub-par acting, a plot held together by visibly peeling scotch tape, and obliquely artificial plot points, and literally nothing innovative or intelligent to say about horror films, zombies, the geo-political climate, or indeed anything at all. It's also a movie that is damn good.

The thing is I enjoy horror movies for being horror movies. As Sam Raimi once said, in reference to his brilliant and underrated Drag Me To Hell, "Horror films have a cheesy integrity to them." As Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, A Life Less Ordinary and the over-rated but competent Slumdog Millionaire) once said, "It's great to do something stupid… something where you go in and you just kill them." They're both right: we go to horror movies to be scared, disturbed, freaked out.

The obsession with the fictional artistic quality of "originality" has been become the defining characteristic of Generation Y Geek-hood, probably due to the internet's overtly violent efforts to accelerate our own artistic jadedness, and the result is a group of people who care more about Avatar ripping off Dances with Wolves and Pocahantas than anything else James Cameron's latest CGI circle-jerk actually did. As Bob "Moviebob" Chipman (an internet bloggist with half my analytical prowess who is nevertheless making several times my yearly salary just by shitting out poorly produced, idiotic video reviews of popular films) once said, "If you insist you've seen it all, it means you'll never see anything else again," and he's right (for once). Humanity has been telling stories for upward of six thousand years. Trust me when I say that we've figured it out by now. If you want to tell a story, then fuck doing something new. The trick is to do something old -- something tried and true -- and have so much fun doing it that the audience can't help but be drawn in to your good natured, maniacally narrative effervescence. (Pardon my english major)

So -- uh -- oh right, the Crazies. Basically, how much you'll enjoy it is directly related to how much you like scary movies, and inversely related to how much you care about plots being 100% air tight.