I mentioned in a previous post that I know something gets a perfect score when I shiver uncontrollably after viewing it. These are the top 1%. The 5 out of 5s. Well, I get a different reaction when something is in the bottom 1%. It feels like the cardiac portion of my stomach was trying to escape through both exits of my body simultaneously. With The Crazies, it nearly succeeded. Synopsis (spoilers, although that shouldn't matter much with this movie): Military plane crashes and contaminates the town's water supply with some sort of drug. Those affected go crazy. Military "quarantines" those affected, but ends up killing nearly everyone. Military nukes Iowa. Sheriff, wife, unborn child escape to a freshly contaminated town. End. In my opinion, horror is better when it is simple. Look at I Am Legend (book, not the sad excuse for a movie with Will Smith). Everything that's scary about it comes from Robert Neville being utterly alone in a small town. Paranormal Activity is scary because something invisible and invulnerable is tormenting them. The movie never exits the property of the tormentees however. But you wouldn't be half as scared as you get if you didn't care about the characters. Robert Neville is some plant worker (not a military scientist) who has a freak immunity to a disease that forced him to kill his wife and kid. The couple in PA are so indelibly ordinary that you almost forget their faces, but you can see yourself doing and saying everything they do and say. They're utterly believable and relatable (especially because they're not at all famous, which does away with another problem with horror movies: preconceived notions). The final little ingredient to a good horror story is subtlety. You need to build and bring the horror in a little at a time. Both IAL and PA do this perfectly. Anxiety is a horror story's greatest ally. Simple premises with believable character and good pacing make great horror stories. Let's now take a look at The Crazies. The Crazies begins with a town on fire, and then the inevitable little text tag that says "2 Days Earlier." Way to start off cliched Crazies. Immediately following this, a man walks onto a baseball field and tries to blow away the main character (Sheriff What'shisname) with a shotgun, forcing Sheriff to put a bullet in his heart. This is a scene that could've forgiven its original sin and set up The Crazies to be an incredibly cool, off-kilter horror story, because it is the type of scene that sticks with you. The movie starts to build, using intrigue and character conflicts to good effect early on. That's when you get the spy satellite shot of the small town (another plus because small towns are inherently creepy and easy to build relationships in) and some more cliched jargon on the screen that essentially points to the imminent military cover-up. We get a few more scenes like the initial baseball field scene, but they go away quickly in favor of the ol' hack-em-up. The movie degrades into a series of disgusting (not grotesque, plain disgusting) scenes of dis-(membered, emboweled, interested). Why this movie isn't scary: 1) You don't care about the characters, 2) Military takes you completely out of the story, 3) Far too complex. Why this movie could've been scary: 1) Small town setting, 2) (Theoretical) down home characters, 3) Simple premise. This movie could've been really good. If they wouldn't of given a reason for the craziness; if the you cared about the characters; if the dialogue was any good; if they stayed within the small town; if-you get the idea. Avoid this movie like it's got a better version of the plague.

With the ongoing deluge of military and squad-based FPS, I have just one question for developers at large: what ever happened to mindless self indulgence? Sure Unreal III delivers a good dose of that good ol' fashioned ultraviolence, but even that storied franchise has gotten more and more complex as the installments mount. The original Halo had a great amount of intense, simple action. Simple action lent itself to effective strategy. Halo 2 attempted to mix things up with the advent of destroyable vehicles and a few new weapons, but with it, it added unneeded (and unwanted) complexity. The more complex a game is, the tougher it is to implement simple strategies. The more complex a strategy is, the less adaptable it tends to be. The less adaptable a strategy is, the easier it is to break it. It all goes back to Occam. I'm not saying complexity is a bad thing; far from it, in fact. When you can plan every detail down to the minutiae, and see it go off without a hitch, it's very rewarding. I'm just saying that for every Rainbow Six, we need a Painkiller. For every complex shooter, we need a simple (but well-executed) one. Thoughts?