On DVD: Breck Eisner Does The Crazies Once More With Feeling

I know what you're thinking: At this rate, they'll get around to remaking even Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things sooner or later. But the new reboot of George A. Romero's The Crazies is the right kind of remake -- the kind that endeavors to squeeze every drop of acid out of its potent scenario, execution-wise, in ways Romero rarely could.

Possibly no American pulp-master of the '60s and '70s had as many potent ideas as Romero, but when it came to fleshing them out effectively on film, he hardly ever had the chops. Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Martin (1977) were his only home-runs; The Crazies (1973) was a cheapjack gloss on a relentlessly upsetting situation: a biological-weapons virus seeps into a small Midwestern town's water table and the populace goes psychopathic, but when the Army moves in to contain the town, the people simply, and crazily, fight back.

I still remember being freaked out as a kid by the movie's TV ads. The idea of ordinary Americans killing each other was no shocker -- the war was still on prime time -- but Romero's images of the white haz-mat-suited Army platoons carpeting the winter fields and streets gave me prepubescent totalitarian nightmares. It spoke more radically about the American love-hate romance with authority than any film of the Nixon era, but unfortunately Romero couldn't keep pace, pull performances out of a lackluster cast, or exploit the symbologies enough to keep the movie from being a clumsy also-ran.

Breck Eisner's new version is tight and slick, starting with the credit sequence use of Johnny Cash singing "We'll Meet Again," at once evoking both Zach Snyder's incendiary opening to Dawn of the Dead and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. The movie proceeds convincingly afoot with Timothy Olyphant as the town sheriff who inexplicably never gets sick, and whose wide startled eyes perfectly track the what-the-hell trajectory of the story, as fraction by fraction, the town begins to eat itself.

Not literally -- the infected citizens on hand (not, ruefully, Romero's little old grandma impaling a gasmasked soldier with a knitting needle) are not Romero-brand zombies, just homicidal juggernauts, regardless of how much Eisner and Co. paint their faces blue and stick colored contact lenses in their eyes. Still, the great tradition of normalcy under fire, of things in safe American places going terribly, terribly wrong, is here in its full glory.

The biggest difference, and it's one that matters, is the rather safe arc the new film takes. Sure, the town is history, and the corpse stacks are high. But Olyphant and his wife (Radha Mitchell, looking rather pissed off throughout, perhaps at her agent?), plus two hangers-on, are "normal," fighting off both the rabid killers that used to be their neighbors, the Army (which moves quickly from internment enclosures to torching bodies) and a pack of lawless redneck hunters collecting (and "dressing"!) human prey. There's little simplistic sense of good vs. evil, which is refreshing. But in Romero's original, the "crazies" quickly formed themselves into a hippie-ish militia, saving each other and running into the woods and directing their homicidal urges toward the Army, which was the real threat. We were on their side! The movie became a hot piece of pulp metaphor, in an era of rampant civil disobedience. However trashily it was made, it became poignant and meaningful.

Not Eisner's, however. No mercy is spared the authorities, but it's not a parable of any kind either. What you see and feel is what you get -- and, conversely, although it is beautifully made (Eisner, the son of Michael, resorts too often to faceoffs saved by an offscreen gunshot, but he cuts on the action like a good Scorsesian), it ends up empty. Good pulp shouldn't be empty. It should ooze with discomfort and resonances and cackling dread.

The Crazies delivers so much in its opening acts -- never less than when Olyphant is simply standing in the middle of town, looking around and trying to figure what is different, and aged sylph/Romero star Lynn Lowry rides past on a bike. It's a shame the comfortable craft of script overwriting (with "beats," lots of beats) has drained it of a chance at being memorable.