Breck Eisner's remake of George Romero’s 1973 shocker is one of the few recent horror retoolings that doesn’t provoke feelings of dread in that unlike, say, Halloween, the original wasn’t much good to begin with.
Ogden Marsh (which sounds like a firm of accountants) is the kind of small town where ghastly things are apt to happen in films like this, in this case a crashed military plane spilling its cargo of toxic lurgy into the local water supply and turning the locals into murderous nut-jobs. Even worse, Hazmat-suited army goons turn up to ‘deal’ with the problem.
We’ve seen it all before, but Eisner stages the shocks efficiently, and Timothy Olyphant channels a pleasing early Bill Paxton vibe as the heroic sheriff.
