The Crazies (2010) - Breck Eisner

newton's first law of film: the book is better than the movie. newton's second law of film: the original is better than the remake. as film is closer to grammar than physics, however, it requires exceptions to prove the rules. case in point the first: fightclub. although the film disavows the book's narrative of waste (replacing "i want to have yr abortion" with "i haven't been fucked like that since gradeschool" and ameliorating its bullshit ending with the pixies' "where is my mind"), brad pitt, ed norton, and helena bonham carter get more palahniuk than palahniuk under david fincher's direction in a near-flawless realisation of the book's potential. but i digress. i've never been able to bring myself to sit through the original, but dollars to doughnuts the crazies remake is the ridiculous exception to the second law.

hold on now, youngsters. in my far-from-humble opinion, romero made three movies: he broke cinematic ground with night of the living dead in 1968, and worked his premise through to its logical conclusion in the following decades with dawn of the dead (1978) and day of the dead (1985). anything subsequent to or divergent from his holy dead trilogy ain't worth watching. there. i said it. and if you've seen land of the dead, you know i speak gospel. so while the idea of the crazies was good, its budget was not, and the trailer makes my argument for me, thereby absolving me of having to watch it in order to know the remake is better. but again, i digress.

eisner's crazies is high-tension smalltown bioweapon black ops at its best ... all the stuff that scared you about ET when you were small, but with less sentiment and more explosions. and while the county sheriff and his lady doctor wife aren't quite as compelling as pintsize drew barrymore and the little muppet with a speak&spell, no one wants to see them get poked by crazy people with pitchforks and a hate-on for anyone sane. the infected are a scary bunch of despondent hyaena people whose laughter is as creepy as their deathstares. turns out that smalltown america is terrifying not only when inbred and texan, but also when midwestern and genetically diverse. throw in a military force who flies into town under the shadow of night, drags people from their homes, divides them into camps, and carts them away in cattle trucks, and you've a deeply unsettling zombie holocaust. if the whitecoats ever come to take me away, please god don't let them be backed by men in camo with gasmasks and AKs.

and speaking of holocausts, the lady doctor is somewhat inexplicably pregnant. not pregnant enough to be encumbered by a visible belly, nausea, or any other fetus-related debility, but pointedly pregnant presumably for the purposes of a sympathetic audience. given the relentless action and trauma of the film, however, it makes little sense that she doesn't miscarry. if that's the kind of carwash yr being born into, what multi-celled organism wouldn't mulligan? no one should be afraid of carwashes.

My Bloody Valentine (2009) - Patrick Lussier

normally i don't dig on remakes, but this one earns its stripes, both as an update and as a stand-alone slasher. my bloody valentine version 2.009 is studiously faithful to the original. despite changes to the backstory of harry warden and the valentine's mining massacre, and a somewhat inexplicable inversion of the TJ/tom and axel characters, this story makes as much (if not more) sense than the first, and the spirit remains the same.

while the remake lacks the blood on tits of which i'm so fond, its opening is no less compelling. a scene of severed limbs and hacked up torsos strewn about a hospital cuts quickly to an eyeball on the end of a pickaxe - already awesome, but especially rad in 3D. these kills were designed for the third dimension, as is made particularly apparent when a retired police officer's jaw is impaled and the lower half comes flying at yr face. and while the pickaxe figures most prominently as the weapon of choice, there are a couple nods to the original, including an equally goretastic dryer kill.

unfortunately the fidelity of the remake isn't shared by its characters, who reflect an irritating trend in contemporary media scripting: men are cheating bastards. some truckstop douche with a loose wedding band receives a well-placed pickaxe to the skull after his nauseatingly disrespectful treatment of a ballsy blonde bombshell with a terrific rack. and axel knocks up some teenage twat whose betrayal of the sisterhood is rewarded when her lovefetus gets a pickaxe to its similarly undeveloped brains. axel himself manages to make good with wife sarah, who forgives him his trespasses and loves him 'til the end, despite the fact that she's pined over tom for the past decade - the same love-of-her-life tom she twice leaves for dead. so i stand semi-corrected: everyone's an asshole in this movie.

upon subsequent viewings, the film's foreshadowing of its twist is quite clever. tom's movements mirror those of his harry warden alter-ego without the glaring inconsistencies characteristic of, say, the french. and when everything goes 'splody in the end, i'm not sad about the potential for a sequel, though i prefer to think that tom offs axel and sarah, like, ten minutes later. cuz i hate them.

My Bloody Valentine (1981) - George Mihalka

canada gave birth to the slasher film with black christmas in 1974, but confirmed the strength of the true north's horror lineage seven years later with its sinister second-born, my bloody valentine. the pride and joy of nova scotia is canadiana at its best: maritime accents, lumberjack jackets, and sponsorship from none other than moosehead! from bottles and cans to actual neon signs advertising the fact, the green and gold abounds as these good canadian kids get their eyeballs pickaxed out. this flick has more beer-soused douchebags in plaid jackets and trucker hats than my local taphouse on a tuesday afternoon. no doot aboot it.

so pardon my jingoism when i declare my bloody valentine one of the greatest slasher flicks of all time. there's a reason that one of the greatest bands of all time took its name a couple of years later. the film literally opens with blood on tits (and a pickaxe through them), and the kills only get better. drowning in boiling hotdogs? check. death by nailgun? check. head impaled on a makeshift shower spurting blood and water? check. MBV has some of the most creative kills in the genre - the laundromat scene alone is enough to warrant its legendary status (and the extra spin-cycle footage on the special edition dvd is worth whatever you pay for it).

the characters are ridiculous. teutonic axel loses his girl and his mind in a bad case of stockholm syndrome, taking on the persona of harry warden, the lone survivor of a mining accident who offed axel's dad in a post-traumatic-stress induced fit of vengeance. his rival TJ is the strong, silent type who returns to town to claim his girl after an unexplained absence. their mutual love interest sarah is a girl of classic '70s braless proportions and possessed of a rather remarkable survival instinct. and the poor barmaid harriet gives up her chariot on the dubious promise of ten minutes alone in a mineshaft with some douche who manages to get them doubly screwed. she should've listened to TJ, who knows and recites the rules well: "no women in the mine." but can you blame them? they hail from a mining town called valentine bluffs, where every day is the worst day of the year. i'd happily take a pickaxe to the face too.

the film ends as brilliantly as it begins, with an old-timey bar ballad about the life and times of harry warden and the residents of valentine bluffs. you can practically sing along. and as far as psychokillers go: a nutjob in a gasmask with a pickaxe? yes please. beats that bagheaded retard hands down.