filmland / By Charlie Myers

Crazy Train

Although director Breck Eisner and writers Scott Kosar and Ray Wright maintain the premise of the original — a plane carrying a bio-weapon crashes, releasing a toxin in a town’s drinking water — the present version seems only fitfully reminiscent of the Romero touch. While crazies do pop up regularly, bearing implements such as a pitchfork (this is Iowa, after all), the film is more in the conspiracy/survival mode.

Set in a small Iowa farming community called Ogden Marsh the survival through-line is provided by David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his pregnant wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), he being the town sheriff and she a doctor.

Trouble arises almost immediately. The sheriff and his deputy, Russell (Joe Anderson), are watching a high school baseball game when a resident appears in the outfield carrying a shotgun. David kills the clearly disturbed man, but other outbreaks of irrational behavior soon occur, the best of which involves the town coroner and his runaway surgical saw that quickly hones in on a delicate body part.

But when David discovers that all communication in or out has been cut off, he knows the town is in real trouble. It seems the military has initiated a containment protocol, and all us jaded viewers know what that means. At this point, the film becomes an escape thriller. Despite the military’s attempt to round up all the residents for “treatment,” some escape.

A small band that includes David, Judy and Russell dodge or kill various crazies while trying to avoid the military and find some way out of the perimeter established by the soldiers. By this time the town and its environs look like a mini-apocalypse, a mode that seems to be popular these days in film. There is a sort of sunrise at the end, but it’s not so rosy.

I expected a much sleazier film going in, but The Crazies plays it straight. Perhaps a little more sleaze might have juiced up the film a bit. It seems a little too respectable and much too predictable. Still, I’m convinced I made the correct viewing decision. Now, maybe if Bruce Willis had played David, everything would have been less polite. Rated R for bloody violence and language. 101m. At the Broadway and Mill Creek.

THE LAST STATION: Leo Tolstoy’s life seems well documented. As a novelist, his wife and brother served as models for several of his major characters, and he kept journals that detailed his version of his own life. His wife Sofiya wrote journals about their life together and, as clearly indicated in Jay Parini’s 1990 novel The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year, as well as the recent film adaptation of the novel, detailed journals were also produced by Tolstoy’s private secretary Valentin Bulgakov, disciple Vladimir Chertkov and his physician Dr. Dushan Makovitsky.

Obviously, then, any writer has a lot of material at his/her disposal for a book about the great Russian writer. Parini’s novel centers primarily on the conflict between Sofiya and Chertkov as they struggle for influence over the 82-year-old Tolstoy.

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