Review of The Crazies (2010) by Chads. — 27 Feb 2010

Russell Clank(Joe Anderson), Ogden Marsh's deputy, comes to terms with his erratic behavior; he's paranoid and has a trigger-itch temper, which are symptomatic of the "crazies", so the infected lawman creates a diversion in order for the Duttons(Timothy Olyphant & Radha Mitchell) to escape the military soldiers' notice.

Hands in the air, Russell approaches the barricade, then provokes the army to take the first shots when he waves his gun in the air. On the ground, wounded, Russell's last words are, "F*** you.

For what you did," which pertains to the systematic destruction of this small Iowa town, but could have more far-reaching connotations, as Russell could be a stand-in for some universal citizen who withstood a bevy of American military campaigns, in which heavy casualties were involved.

It's no accident that "The Crazies" is set in the midwest, a region of the country where people are less likely to be contemptuous toward the direction of our foreign policy. "The Crazies" is no "Blue Velvet", but the opening scene that highlights a farmer traversing the baseball field with a shotgun, almost serves the same function as the famous opening montage in the David Lynch film.

Instead of carnivorous bugs buried in the grass, a carnivorous government is responsible for something buried in the swamp. Ogden Marsh is a town full of patriotic ideologues. At a funeral home, the mortician sews shut the eyes of his clients, the very same people who proudly display the American flag outside their homes.

Here, the filmmaker shows how having blind faith in the integrity of our government's actions can sometimes get you killed. Nobody blinks an eye when innocent people die abroad. But when a plane carrying biological weapons crashes in the swamp, the ideologues experience what the other "crazies" in the Middle East experience.

Most pointedly, the Duttons and their two fellow travellers watch as a mother and her son are shot in cold blood, even though they might not be "crazy". "The Crazies" might not be a political movie for some, and that's fine, because even if the moviegoer watches it like a zombie, it also works as a superior suspense/thriller.