The Crazies

*** - Sheriff Bullock of “Deadwood” stars as, well, the sheriff of Crazyville in this competently helmed remake of an old Romero film. There is a decent balance between horror and thriller aspects, and it doesn’t get overly gory or violent, which certainly works in its favor. I’m sure that when the original came out in the 70s, the many clichés of the genre were not present, or at least not as entrenched and commonplace as they are today. However, viewing this after having seen so many of these types of films that have cropped up in the ensuing years causes this to feel pretty uninspired. It does provide a fairly tense and mysterious alternative to slasher-type flicks, though. One thing that puzzled me was the utter lack of exposition regarding the mechanism of causation of the toxin that drove the citizenry bananas. Some of the infected were lucid and relatively rational, some were transformed into unstoppable monsters, and some were practically motionless zombies. It never really got into why there were different effects on different people, though. Oh well, I guess one shouldn’t really expect too much explanation from this type of movie.