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The Mass Media

”The Crazies” Painfully Sane

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”The Crazies” Painfully Sane

‘The Crazies”, a remake of a 1970’s horror flick based on a military experiment gone wrong, is a stupid fucking movie. As a brief disclaimer, this review is completely biased and entirely unfair. I fell asleep and I fell asleep early and I wasn’t even tired. Actually, I should say it’s half biased; my nap could mean I potentially missed some awesome unforeseen mind shatteringly good portion portion of the film.  But I doubt it. Simply put, I hated this movie and I would rather be writing a review about a personal colonoscopy or an episode of The George Lopez Show. The film, directed by Breck Eisner, tells the story of the small town of Ogden Marsh. Its population is infected with an unknown toxin that causes the townsfolk to act like Courtney Love and Gary Busey if you locked them in a closet with a kilo of blow. It turns out that the government was producing some secrete chemical weapon and accidently released it on the population. The next thing you know, you have a bunch of blood thirsty animals running around killing each other looking like something straight out of public service announcement for meth (without the prepubescent prostitution). Then comes the military population trying to quarantine and eventually eliminate all the crazies living in Ogden Marsh. I could go into a more  in depth synopsis of the plot and the actors involved, but that would be boring and people who dig these sort of movies are going to see it anyways, so what’s the point? First, I’ll again admit why I’m unfit to even complain about this movie. I don’t know anything about zombie movies. I know that there were some serious classics. I know that when it was a new genre it was badass and actually scary and intense and conquered some uncharted cinematic territory. I know that some people go apeshit for these flicks and will be mad at me for the following sentence. New zombie movies (not Rob Zombie movies, but zombie movies) are ridiculous and a poor imitations of older movies. So I know you’re sitting here reading this thinking “this says nothing about the movie I was told I was going to be reading about, this kid is just a whiny bitch who doesn’t like zombie movies and he didn’t even see a zombie movie he saw a movie about crazy people”. Well, my collective audience, you are wrong. THIS IS A ZOMBIE MOVIE. Besides the predictable plot line and B list acting, the producers are liars. Do not call this movie ”The Crazies” call it ”The Zombies”.  I don’t give a fuck if they were just “sick” or “crazy”- they were zombies.  They tried to make a zombie movie into some sort of political worldly bullshit and that is frustrating. Of course the movie was ridiculous; movies are allowed to be ridiculous. But, you have to at least be honest about what the ridiculousness is all about, and don’t try to cover up something that’s been done by adding a slight adjustment. It had its traditional horror movie moments that horror fans would enjoy: a guy almost gets his buisness cut off with a surgical saw in a doctor’s office, the genius main characters decide it’d be a good idea to get their car washed in the midst of complete anarchy where they get bombarded by the undead, or the dead, or the almost dead, or whatever they are. The highlight of my movie going experience was the three times I lied at the oncession stand and claimed a high school kid knocked over my Slurpee, so, I did get some free refills for a combined total of 120 oz of Blue Raspberry flavored bliss.  Not a total loss, other than my time. Apparently vampires exhibiting quasi-homoerotic tendencies are all the new rage, so I’ll give it up to this movie for mixing things up a little bit, but they certainly didn’t mix it up too much. If you still plan on seeing this movie, at least know you’re not checking out any profound flick about mental illness and the actions of legitimate psychotic individuals. It’s a bunch of zombies getting chased by the military.  ”The Crazies” is like a group episode of Intervention staged in Southie with Donald Rumsfeld handling the medication.

About the Contributor
Jacob Aguiar served as the following positions for The Mass media the following years: News Editor: 2011-2012; Fall 2012 Leisure Editor: 2010-2011