Remake of the 1973 HORROR film directed by George A. Romero about a mysterious phenomenon that causes the citizens of a quiet Georgian town go mad. .
Filmed in the state of Georgia.
Executive Producer: George A. Romero.
Cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Danielle Panabaker, Joe Anderson, Christie Lynn Smith Director: Breck Eisner Genres: Action Thriller, Escape Film, Horror Sahara director Breck Eisner teams with screenwriters Ray Wright (Pulse) and Scott Kosar (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to give George A. Romero's underrated 1973 shocker a shiny new makeover in this update starring Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell.
Perform a Google search on "small-town America," and eventually you'll stumble across Ogden Marsh, a picturesque hamlet situated a safe distance from the nearest big city, and full of friendly faces. The citizens of Ogden Marsh are happy, albeit unremarkable people, but they're about to discover just how fragile their warm slice of the American dream really is. When a mysterious toxin transforms the locals into murderous maniacs, it's up to Sheriff David Dutton (Olyphant) to find out why a man who was once an upstanding citizen would attempt to massacre the local youth baseball team, and a caring father would burn his beloved family alive. Within hours the town has descended into total chaos, and the government has ordered it quarantined. Anyone who attempts to escape will be shot on sight, whether they're infected or not. Realizing that their only hope for survival is to fight through the madness that has consumed their once-quiet town, Sheriff Dutton, his pregnant wife, Judy (Mitchell), his deputy Russell (Joe Anderson), and frightened medical center assistant Becca (Danielle Panabaker) wage an epic struggle to discover the source of this malevolent scourge while fending off their infected friends and neighbors. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
This 2010 remake of a somewhat obscure 1973 George Romero picture injects a mysterious virus into the water supply of a small Iowa town, and the consequences are… well, you didn't expect the consequences to be positive, did you? The movie is calledThe Crazies, after all. So when local folk begin acting a mite peculiar, it just means they've gone to the well too often--literally. Borrowing the structure ofInvasion of the Body Snatchers, the remake gets off to a clumsy start, but as the noninfected rally around the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and his doctor wife (Radha Mitchell), the action becomes streamlined and reasonably inventive. Director Breck Eisner has a particular knack for finding ingenious ways of killing people (a knife through the hand becomes a useful tool for the sheriff in one turn-the-tables moment), and he's been wise enough to hire respectable actors for the top-lined duties; along with Olyphant and Mitchell, there's also Joe Anderson (Across the Universe) as a loyal, amped-up deputy. If the movie misses the tart social-context stuff that Romero does so well, it at least fills the bill when it comes to the chase-and-escape business of a contemporary horror picture. The spate of such 21st-century remakes of 1970s horror pictures misses the raw, raggedy unease of those low-budget projects, but if you're going to make a slick new update,The Craziesis the way to do it.--Robert Horton
Stills from The Crazies (Click for larger image) 
