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.