Crazy scary - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Crazy scary

Can I admit something right off? I’m a sucker for B-movie horror cheese, especially if it has solid production values, a sense of flair and a dash of dark laughs amid the arterial spray.

Cue “The Crazies”: Check, check and check.

Like most films of its genre, this one won’t rank as an immortal classic. But it’s got nifty thrills, finely nuanced “gotcha” moments and splatterific action, including perhaps the most gruesome use of a pitchfork since the 1999 genre gem “Ravenous.”

(Never heard of it? It’s worth checking out — a whacked-out tale of cannibalism in the remote Sierra Nevadas starring Guy Pearce, David Arquette and Neal McDonough, with the immortal tag line: “You are who you eat.”)

One other distinction that “The Crazies” can cite: what may well be the scariest car wash scene in horror film history.

The setup is disarmingly simple. On a warm summer day in a bucolic Iowa town, in which all 1,260 residents know one another by name and life is placid and peaceful, many have gathered to watch the local high school baseball team in action.

A man comes striding in from right-center field wearing a thousand-yard stare and wielding a fully loaded shotgun. Sheriff Dave Dutten (effectively intense Timothy Olyphant) confronts the man, trying to talk sense to him. But when his shotgun comes up, Dave puts him down with a bullet to the heart.

Cut to a house outside town where the high school principal, sporting the same thousand-yard stare, is mowing his lawn after having locked his wife and son in a closet and set fire to the house.

Clearly, something has gone awry. And it could have something to do with the dead pilot and the crashed military aircraft submerged in a bog that is smack upstream from the town’s drinking-water supply.

Why, if you go in for conspiracy theories, you could almost imagine this being the kind of black-ops situation that is ripe for some shadowy government type to “initiate a containment protocol.”

In short order, more townsfolk are wigging out, locked and loaded military troops are rampaging through the cornfields in full hazmat gear, and Dave, his doctor wife Judy (B-movie queen Radha Mitchell) and a few other still-sane citizens are running for their lives through a nightmare.

About two-thirds in, it may occur to hardcore genre fans that this feels a lot like a George A. Romero film.

And whaddaya know … when the closing credits roll, who shows up as executive producer but the auteur of the “Living Dead” franchise himself.

In fact, the entire project is an update of a film of the same name that Romero directed and co-wrote in 1973, five years after his landmark “Night of the Living Dead.”

Refurbishing that movie at this particular time is a canny move; Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with authority, but the flames of anti-government paranoia are glowing especially hot these days.

With goosebump-inducing set pieces, a sprinkling of morbid humor and a cool nihilistic grace note at the end, “The Crazies” is a solid addition to its niche.

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Rated R for language, graphic violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.