2/18/10

Is there a more unmanly confession to make than that something really, REALLY spooks you?  Well, that emasculation only doubles when the thing in question isn't real, and the temptation is to cover it up with the biggest blanket you can find and never speak of it again.  But I thought it would be therapeutic to discuss the number one movie topic on my mind these days.  Nope, not the Oscars (although my preview will be posting shortly).  Not the question of whether the long-delayed Shutter Island is worth the wait or Warner Bros. decision to retrofit Clash of the Titans for 3D and the logjam on the nation's relatively few 3D screens it will create with How to Train Your Dragon opening the week before.  No, what's on my mind these days is the fact that Overture Pictures' upcoming remake of George Romero's 1973 horror flick The Crazies scares the crap out of me.

How can this be, you might ask, since I haven't even seen it and, God willing, never will?  Simple, the one thing far scarier than any movie:  a really scary trailer.  First, let me step back and point out that I am what those in the psychiatric profession call a "high reactor", meaning that the Fight or Flight reflex that kicks in for normal people when they're in, you know, actual trouble, will stay stuck in the "ON" position for me pretty much forever.  This is annoying on a day-to-day basis, but gets to really be a pain when my brain finds something irrational that it can really accept as the cause of my imminent demise.  And thanks to the skillful folks at Overture's marketing department, that cheerfully irrational part of my brain is now convinced that the Crazy Apocalypse is imminent (if not closer).

Hey, don't look at me like that!  You know the advance trailer, attached last fall to Overture releases Law Abiding Citizen and The Men Who Stare at Goats is creepy as all get-out!  Sensational word choices dolled out in perfect intervals ("Your friends... your family... are changing";  "This... is only... the beginning"), ghoulish images of societal collapse, and the remarkably apt counterintuitive decision to back it all with Tears for Fears' version of Mad World, whose lyrics turn out to be 100% about said Crazy Apocalypse ("All around me are familiar faces, no expression, no expression").  Of course, all this would just be a well-made scare machine if not for the piece du resistance, that closing image that seems to have been pulled directly from my phobias:  a room full of people strapped to tables being systematically impaled by a guy with a pitchfork.  It HAD to be a pitchfork!  AND strapping to tables!  AND impaling!  And, yes, the trailer also makes it clear that these sort of pitchfork-wielding maniacs are lying in wait in people's homes waiting to, you know...  And I DO NOT APPROVE!

I've carefully studied my shoes during repeated showings of the 2nd trailer that surfaced last month:  I know there's lots of evil cackling and they're clearly making all the hay they can out of that pitchfork, which seems to spend half the trailer grinding against something or other.  And that sound coming from the funeral parlor?  Seems to be screaming.  But I've enjoyed Trailer B a lot more than Trailer A because A)I haven't actually seen it, and B)it includes no scary song choices.  And to think I voted for Adam Lambert every single week and he does this to me!

Ah, then there's the posters, admirable in their hinting at greater horrors that lie off the page.  The advance one-sheet offers a traffic sign on a lonely highway with the words "Help Us" written in either red paint or, more likely, blood.  The regular one-sheet?  The #&$^@ing pitchfork, of course.  But in case both are too subtle for potential viewers, there are banners hanging above kids-eye level at just about every area theater that my peripheral vision has told me contain some sort of bloodied-up scary faces weilding sharp objects (I'm sure a pitchfork is involved).  To this, my brain responds "CRAZIES!  CRAZIES!  RUN, YOU &$#%@ER!!!", so I haven't perused them at any length.  Or at all.  

Which brings me to the real showdown which is at hand.  As we enter the two-week window proceeding and following the movie's February 26 release, the Internet will undoubtedly be flooded with Crazies banner ads which are pretty likely to prominently feature that pitchfork among other unsavory images.  As it's currently all I can do to persuade my brain that none of the rooms in the creeky old house where I live alone contain concealed Crazies (OK, sometimes I have to double-check before High-Reactor Brain believes me), it would seem unhealthy to tease it with a steady diet of bloody pitchfork banner ads.  Stress kills, you know.  Just like Crazies.  So, I need a solution.

There's an easy one, which involves staying off the Internet until something around baseball's Opening Day.  This, beyond being so cowardly as to demand a lifetime of shame, won't work.  How would I update this site?  Or get the showtimes for the movies I'm updating this site about?  Or read people bitching about how much the Oscars sucked (oops, had a psychic moment there)?  Nope, that won't work.  Now, I've considered the construction of a Banner Ad Blocker similar to the machine children build to observe a solar eclipse.  Since all banner ads run either at the top of the side of screens, it would affectively reduce the size of my computer screen by the key 25-odd percent necessary to run Crazy-free.  It may yet come to that, but for now, I'm using the time-tested power of my hands to keep banner ads at bay.  And avoiding the most likely sites to offend (Movieweb has always seemed to thrive on running the most horrific ads it can find on pages for kids' movies, don't ask me why) as much as possible.

I'm sure there's a therapist or two reading this thinking "Poor dope, the real answer to his problem is to face his fears and make those ads his friend and then see the movie."  After all, they'd point out to me, The Crazies stars many actors I admire (and Timothy Olyphant doesn't get nearly enough leading man roles) and more or less sounds like The Happening, a movie I loved, in reverse.  Director Brett Eisner has previously horrified only those who've read the itemized 180-million dollar budget that came out when the producers of his Sahara were sued by novelist Clive Cussler.  And no movie ever made could be as scary as High-Reactor Brain KNOWS The Crazies will be.

To these people, I have a simple response:  ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR #&$^@%ING MINDS???

Yeah, yeah, I wanna go through a repeat of that month when High-Reactor Brain screamed "Blair Witch!  Blair Witch!" every time a twig broke within earshot.  And need I remind you that the only reason anybody remembers Romero's original Crazies is because of his then-bold choice (remember, even Night of the Living Dead ends with the living triumphant, even if the final moments reveal them to be a bunch of trigger-happy crackers) to end on a note of apocalyptic doom.  Now that one can pick up apocalyptic doom at any multiplex like so much low-hanging fruit, what do you think are the odds that Sheriff Olyphant needs to make plans for Memorial Day?  Not a chance in hell!  There's a pitchfork with that man's name on it, I tell you, and as long as I can stay two steps ahead of the coming Crazy Apocalypse, I plan to do just that.

It's what any sane man would do.