Life must be particularly bittersweet for George A. Romero at the moment.
While the director – a true legend of horror and one of the nicest guys you could ever wish to meet – is slaving away up in Canada on another micro-budget movie, Overture Films has given the green light to yet another remake of one of the great man’s films, presumably backed by a budget that Romero can only dream about these days.
The film in question is his 1973 flick, The Crazies, in which a virus that causes its victims to become homicidally insane spreads through a small town. A companion piece of sorts to Night Of The Living Dead, The Crazies isn’t exactly a horror film, but a thriller that had plenty to say about the inadequacies of government, the army and the baser elements of human nature.
Its central plot – in which a small group of survivors try to escape from the town, which is overrun by the infected and trigger-happy, incompetent soldiers – has been echoed since in countless movies, most recently Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem (no, seriously), and offers plenty of scope for a modern take.
Breck Eisner – who called the shots on the breezy, if insubstantial, Sahara – will direct the remake, from a script Ray Wright and Scott Kosar. Romero has bagged an executive producer credit, although we’re not sure how involved he will be.
Ordinarily, we’d be heaping great dollops of cynicism upon this project, but if we learned anything from Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead – apart from the fact that we’d all be utterly shafted if zombies could run – it’s that you write off a Romero remake at your peril. And we say that hoping that nobody has seen Steve Miner’s Day Of The Dead retread, which instantly undermines our argument.
Production on The Crazies, which had previously been set up at Rogue Pictures, will begin next year.