The Crazies (1973) / The Crazies (2009)

The government accidentally spills a top secret bio-weapon in a small town causing everyone to go berserk. George Romero is responsible for directing the original, and executive producing the remake. Getting through the original Crazies was one of the more trying film experiences I've had. Filled with inane directorial inspirations, bad audio, and really ugly actors. I mean REALLY ugly. My mind was wandering (as it was prone to do during this) and I remembered how boring Dawn of the Dead was the last time I saw it. I had liked it a lot, but on the last viewing noticed some inexcusably stupid shit in that movie followed by twenty minute stretches where NOTHING happens. Is everybody wrong and George Romero is really just a terrible director? If The Crazies had been Romero's first film, instead of Night of the Living Dead, we might not have ever heard of him. (It feels like a first film, it's very clumsy/showy in a film student way) I kept saying to myself "It's almost over, it's almost over..." (Wasn't that the promotional slogan for the movie?) It wasn't almost over.

A B movie in 1973 is different than a B movie in 2009. The remake loses some of that cheap movie rawness, but grows a brain and a heart. A far superior movie to the original. It's like a perfect example of the filmmaker making the right decision every time, whereas Romero, well, you know. You can tell right away, ten minutes in, when Romero had made about thirty dumb mistakes, director Breck Eisner has already rolled out two or three brilliantly paced sequences, all rather creepy. Romero had the government officials as the main characters. Shouting, smoking generals barking orders and gnashing their teeth. Here, the townspeople, the actual victims of the virus, are the heroes. A much more compelling (and correct) choice. Maybe Romero was being old fashioned by making the government the heroes (had Watergate happened yet?) In the remake, you barely see them. Just a jet high up in the sky, a car skidding away, or a distant army cloaked in gas masks. They are just a malevolent force causing all the mayhem and observing from afar. See this. It's not just a B horror movie, it's an excellent one.