The Crazies Trailer #2: A More Straightforward Look At A Small Town Apocalypse

The first trailer for Breck Eisner's The Crazies was pretty good, but with one significant misstep: it made heavy use of the song 'Mad World', which for the next decade should be considered as owned lock, stock and barrel by Donnie Darko. That aside, the trailer had a fairly intriguing vibe.

This second trailer omits the song, thankfully, and is a bit more straightforward. It gets into a lot less plot, jumping in when things are already going off the rails in a small town. There's more of a slasher vibe to this cut, which I'm guessing is a deliberate move to skew the film as something more simple than it actually is.

As a result, the downside is that in this clip there's less of a sense that The Crazies is anything other than a 28 Days Later-style zombie movie derivative. It should be more than that, as the Romero original had much more than just pseudo-zombies going on. The first trailer implies that the same thing will be in the remake, too. I do kinda love the kicker shot here. We just don't see enough medical implements running wild, threatening genitals.

Breck Eisner directs The Crazies from a script by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright. It tells the story of a small town struck by insanity when an unknown toxin starts turning its happy, law-abiding citizens into mindless killing machines. Trying desperately to survive both the infected populace and the subsequent military response, the town's Sherrif (Timothy Olyphant), his pregnant wife (Radha Mitchell), his deputy (Joe Anderson), and an assistant at the medical center (Danielle Panabaker) find themselves forced to band together if they ever intend on getting out of the town alive.

Here's a low-res version of the trailer; check it out in HD at Yahoo.