Hey folks, Harry here. Now - this is something just odd as hell. Paramount is doing a remake of George Romero's too often overlooked powerful work, THE CRAZIES. It's all about an accident - something the military had hoped never would happen, but one of their wacky weapons of mass destruction... in transport kinda got all over this small Pennsylvania town - causing the population to kinda go rabid - but not all at once. And sometimes it seems people don't go at all, but they're carriers. The genius of Romero's film is that he puts us rooting for a group to survive and get out, even as we know that they must absolutely be killed. It's a great scenario and it is absolutely maddening. Now Romero's film was a low-budget jewel. While it could definitely have used more money - I hope that remake-writer-du-jour Scott Kosar kept the sense of immediacy and panic and isolation. In many ways it can be bigger, but really - what gets me very interested is that Brad Anderson is directing this. He's the one that wrestled that amazing performance and dedication out of Christian Bale in THE MACHINIST. He also directed the atmospheric and wonderful film... SESSION NINE as well as NEXT STOP WONDERLAND. He's a very psychological director that has a wonderful eye for atmosphere. Essentially there's all sorts of great "outbreak" flicks, tv movies - I've always geniunely liked the set-up in THE CRAZIES best... it has the glorious insanity of trying to cover it up, of rooting for the very people that could be the ruin of all. I love the moral quandry of it all. And in the hands of someone like Brad Anderson - there could be something special there.
