'The Crazies': Town goes homicidally nuts in somewhat uninspired remake

When is a zombie not really a zombie? That's the murderous question asked by this somewhat uninspired re-imagining of a 1973 film by George A. Romero, who pretty much invented modern zombies with "Night of the Living Dead."

The insensate carnage-seekers that stumble about the small town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, aren't dead, nor are they hungry for human flesh; they just want to kill. Whether with a workaday shotgun blast or a pitchfork to the torso, they're simply out to satisfy their rotting brains, not to feast on the deliciousness of yours.

Infected with a bioweapon virus that's been accidentally introduced into the water supply, these citizens have been given their titular nickname by the biosuited soldiers deployed to contain the outbreak by any means necessary. That means rounding up and exterminating everyone — sick or not — before the virus can spread and turn the entire world, well, crazy.

The heroes are the town sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and the town doctor (Radha Mitchell), a husband and wife who happen to be rather implausibly immune to the crazy-making disease. They also seem to have a high tolerance for the trampling of civil rights as the government carries out its pogrom on their friends and neighbors. When they do spring into action, it's primarily against the putrefying nonzombies whose blind hatred for the uninfected is gleeful cause for the requisite sprays of blackened blood and grotesque gouts of gore.

Olyphant and Mitchell are fairly bland as bewildered bystanders to the contagion and the mysterious actions of a masked military that remains almost entirely anonymous (in Romero's original, the army's perspective was half the story). Adding a little bravado to their rebellion is the sheriff's deputy and sidekick (Joe Anderson), whose disposition tends to the roguishly nutty even before insanity rules. (Seattle's John Aylward makes a fleeting cameo as the town's mayor.)

There are a few inventive set pieces, including a scary standoff at a high-school baseball game and a blood-spattered ride through a carwash that ends with an amusing visual twist. But director Breck Eisner (former Disney chief Michael Eisner's son) stumbles in playing up an inherent tension that could have given audiences their own case of the crazies.

Ted Fry: tedfry@hotmail.com