Before anyone even says a word: no one ever claimed my writing skills happened to extend to clever titles. They don’t.

A while ago, a friend of mine mentioned a movie trailer for what looked like a great zombie movie that he thought was titled “The Creepies” or something like that. I didn’t think much of it, since zombie movies (like 28 Anythings Later) tend to take themselves seriously to the point where they end up crawling up their own asses. Resist the urge to bitch about how I’m wrong and that the 28 Anythings Later movies were artistic genius for now, if that’s possible.

The previews for “The Crazies”? They look promising. My initial reasoning to go see it? Well, that came from the fact that I’m not a movie buff and had no idea that there was the 1973 version of “The Crazies”. Damn you, Romero, wrecking my belief that this movie could be a spiritual successor to Romero’s (Place) of the Dead. That logic went down the toilet the second I found out Romero directed the original “Crazies”. Keeping this in mind, it’s now necessary to wonder if this version of “The Crazies” lives up to the standards set by the previous one (and, as I haven’t seen that one, those standards could be easy to meet).

For those of you who have been living under a rock, or just can’t be bothered with cable, the general plot of “The Crazies” is that there’s this nice town, Ogden Marsh, in Iowa (a mythical land in the United States that resists the passage of time). The people suddenly start going banana-rama crazy and killing the other people because of a virus that doesn’t make Christopher Eccleston put them on a leash in his backyard.

Maybe I have high hopes because I want a crazy people horror movie that’s good, so I can rinse away the foul taste left behind by 28 Weeks Later. Maybe I’m just hopeful because the previews are creepy as hell. Or maybe, just maybe, I hope this movie carelessly wanders into the busy street and is mowed down by the speeding truck that is my critic’s wrath (which will not be hauling my mighty cache of poorly conceived metaphors).

My tip to the folks who were involved with this movie? Delay its release in theaters, and add in footage of this man:

“The Crazies” arrives in theaters February 26th.