The Crazies is capable horror film. It’s tense, and a little smarter than the average scary movie. It needed a little more dread and fewer predictable things jumping out from the dark at you.

The film is a remake of Horror God George Romero’s 1973 “The Crazies,” and manages to achieve the task of doing a good job with it.

Small town Iowa Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) finds himself at the center of town gone crazy after a military jet carrying secrets crashes nearby. One by one, the town’s residents turn into murderous psychotics and no one can explain why.

I wouldn’t say the town folk are turning into zombies, but rather the do not kill instinct in their brain gets turned off.

The film is set in Iowa, but a rather generic looking military force is sent into clean up the mess. It seems like it would be the U.S. military that’s sent on a contain-and-eradicate mission, but it’s not clear.

What is clear, is the idea of who’s crazier? Is it the infected locals, or the government that’s bringing down a big hurt on its own citizens? Who are the hero’s to run from? The infected or the military? Is this a horror story, or a man without a country whose on the run?

In my head, those ideas muddied what seemed to be a pretty good idea for a scary story. Adding in the tension where the viewer and the characters in the film can’t quite tell whether a person is infected, or just way stressed out is a nice touch.

It’s not bad, but Romero always adds a far superior gloom to his work. It was a little lost on this one.