The Crazies with Timothy Olyphant was on TV and because it was him i got drawn into watching it, it doesn't have the government agents/scientists plotline from the 70s version (by George Romero) so you don't get any explanation until near the end when they meet a guy who expo dumps it (which the movie doesn't seem to have listened to), also they give it a bit of a happier ending iirc the original's ending right
but the main thing is he plays a sheriff and kept doing stuff where i was wanting someone to angerly say "RAYLAN!" or faux-happily say "RAYLAN GIVENS!"
it was okay, dunno if i'd seek it out, i did guess the order of people getting knocked off wrong so points i guess...and there were a few nice "reveals of the level of the situation" type things near the end though the movie kept doing "person sees it" cut to other stuff, other character comes to that person and is like "what?" and then they show you, which was silly as they weren't really surprising as much as nice additions to the picture it was painting
biggest complaint: to hide, one character goes in a walk-in freezer and when they do the "ha, surprise! but it's okay!" type jump for raylan to re-appear, he comes in like he had already been fucking hiding in there the entire scene...terrible blocking, but it also made it funnier i guess since i already figured that was the type of jump that was coming and afterwards i was thinking that fucker was hiding in there the whole time without telling or helping...so maybe biggest complaint that became my favorite part?
one other odd thing was that it seemed like they were shooting the gore to imply it more than directly show much of it, stuff like someone is stabbed and you see it from under the table or people get heads blown off but you see it from POV of character hiding so it's at some distance, etc. but then randomly raylan gets his hand stabbed into a floor and they show him pulling the fucking thing out of the floor with it in said hand from right close up and entirely which was endlessly more unsettling than any of the other many many "suggested" shot gore type scenes
yes, i know talking about a horror movie in this clinical fashion is weird but when they're so formulaic my brain automatically starts deconstructing the pacing timings like how it's been too long with nobody being attacked or whatever
also pretending he was raylan probably made it a hundred times more enjoyable especially because it immediately makes you take it less seriously and would be the only reason to watch it...for free/on a service you already have/etc.
i was almost thinking of it like the American version of Dark Water, a bad The Ring trend follower that they cut to be PG-13 for some reason, shot by the guy who did the equally awful but also often image-wise quite beautiful The Motorcycle Diaries which Dark Water also does with a dreary Roosevelt Island...in any case, you can't take the horror seriously at all because it's so bad, as are everything about the main two characters/actors, but there's a cast of hilarious side characters played by John C. Reilly, Tim Roth and Pete Postlethwaite who are totally acting as if they're in the wrong movie and the little daughter character contributes to this because everything involving her is laughable as if she's seriously messed up (especially the scene with her teacher at school iirc) instead of being a foreboding part of the horror to where i was enjoying it as an unintentional comedy to the displeasure of a certain female theatergoer some rows back at the time it released
The Crazies certainly isn't unintentionally funny enough for that level of enjoyment, but pretending he was Raylan certainly had that effect of improving the film probably instead of it being regular ol dreck that i felt bad about watching
so one star, plus one for Raylan... and since I rambled about it Dark Water gets an unintentional three stars that could have been four (five seems like a stretch) if they hadn't wasted so much time with that main horror plot and instead spent more time with the lovable side characters, especially some scenes of them telling people about this nuts woman and her more nuts little girl they met at work
oh wait, one other thing, The Crazies is supposedly set in Iowa, but that isn't fucking Iowa at all, it's down South somewhere, you're not fooling me at all Hollywood (checks wikipedia, shot in Georgia!) ha! i should take away that star i gave you for Raylan!
