The Crazies (2010)

(Disclaimer 1: As I write this, at minute fifty-six of one hundred, a pregnant woman sits, gagged and restrained, in the second-floor bedroom of a farmhouse. If her captor practices some rusty, pitchforked insanity on her, I may need to revise my post.)

(Disclaimer 2: I haven't seen Romero's 1973 original, so be warned, what I write applies only to the 2010 remake.)

The only reason to watch a movie like this is to see a bunch a crazy people do depraved, homicidal shit to sane people. So far, there isn't nearly enough of that. Sure, the town's coroner goes guano with an electric saw AND a stitching needle, you know, for the finer touches, and anonymous farmer #2 bills the maternity ward as a theater in which to perform his best impersonation of Vlad the Impaler--who defeated Sun Tzu on last week's Deadliest Warrior, by the way. But as my clock ticks past the hour mark, I count too many instances of romantic piety and/or paramilitary whatever, and not enough scenes of batshit hillbillies finding new uses for the thresher.

A horror movie's wampum is blood, not hazmat suits and tenderness. C

(Update: I wasn't wrong.)

Slothrop: Hey Koko, not sure you ever explained why people watch horror movies. If presented with the option of being scared or not scared, I opt for the latter. Does this decision make Slothrop a puss or more debonair than all y'all?

Koko: People watch horror movies for all sorts of reasons, Slothrop. That's like asking, why do people watch dramas? To feel sobered? Or foreign films. To feel alienated? Your question suggests that you think less of horror than you do of other genres that, presumably, evolved in France after the war and concern sad families or Christmas, or your ubiquitous whores, and which therefore need no justification. Sure, some people watch horror movies to feel scared, just as they may watch comedies to feel amused. But we don't define a genre by its effect on the audience. And we don't hierarchically rank movies starring Catherine Deneuve over ones with exploding zombie heads just because. Perhaps the better question is, why do you arbitrarily reduce a multifaceted genre to one of its many possible effects? Not every drama is a tearjerker, nor every foreign film an excuse for softcore porn, nor every specimen of horror a bogeyman.

Also, and speaking of your whores, I'd be more careful, were I you, to reserve the word "debonair" for gentlemen less wantonly inclined.

Now, if you're asking why I watch horror movies, that I can answer:

1. They accept their absurdity and use it to bully their artifice.
2. Abjection, dude. The things that revolt us also attract us, and nothing plays that tune clearer and louder, and more expertly, than horror.
3. The vast majority of good ones are also very funny. Humor, after all, is born of discomfort.
4. Coleridge argued that by invoking the supernatural, an author can more decisively compel his audience to regard the natural world with wonder. That, but less pompous.
5. Fear, confusion, ritual, and dread are older than high-minded sympathy and affection. They even predate the family. We should take them seriously.
6. Other stuff, too, but I'm tired.

I order you to watch Dawn of the Dead. Nothing is less scary than the animated dead. For god's sake, they can barely walk.