To gear up to watch The Crazies, I watched George A. Romero's 1973 version a few days beforehand. While more modernized for our time, you can still see and feel homage to the 70's style that made Romero known for.

While Romero serves as executive producer, Breck Eisner (Michael Eisner's son) takes the helm as director on this one. Eisner does well setting up the premise in a fast pace, but tails off at times to give us more of a b-movie tone.

Despite the typical horror movie cliches, such as people splitting up to investigate things or having a bad guy lurking in the background without the good guys knowledge, Eisner gives this version a little more life into the storyline and characters. Of course similarities are there, but with a few modifications. One thing I want to mention about the changes that I really enjoyed was a simple one, the mentality of the leads here. Where in the original, the leads had no problem killing military to save their own skin, here they take non-lethal approaches to achieve their objectives, minus one exception. That to me gave the characters more respect in my mind.

Here I go with telling the differences between the two without giving a minor synopisis for those who haven't got a clue what its about. Taking place in a small Iowa town, townfolk unexpectadly start becoming zombie-like and doing out of the ordinary things that put people in harms way. When the local sheriff, played excellently by Timothy Olyphant, has to gun down a local at the towns baseball game things start to go wrong, way wrong for the town. After another incident, a little investigation finds a plane crashed in a lake that supplys the towns water supply. Soon the whole town falls victim to what the plane was carrying and the military comes in to contain the situation.

Olyphant does very well in his acting abilities here to show good range. He plays a very strong lead. Radha Mitchell plays an equally strong female lead as his wife. Both show some good chemistry and makes us feel their emotions as much as they do throughout the film. Adding a bit of comic relief is Joe Anderson as the deputy. Anderson almost steals the scenes in which he is in. I'm not fimilar with his previous work but i'm going to have to check some of his past films now after watching him in this.

I watched this film with my little brother and after it was over we talked about our thoughts. We both enjoyed it but, I can tell that since I watched the original, I appreciated the film more. If I hadn't I may have rated this 3 out of 5 pitchforks but instead I give The Crazies 3 1/2 pitchforks.