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The Crazies is the least likely movie I've ever seen. Nothing about it outwardly appears to be good: It's a horror movie, it's a remake, and it's a zombie movie. Breck Eisner, whose only other major film was Sahara, directed.

It's got a menagerie of writers, none of whom really carry much to their names, and worst of all, it's not supposed to be funny. And yet, somehow, it's an awesome movie.

Starring Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, The Crazies chronicles the dissention of a small Iowa town into madness as a government-made toxin accidentally leaks into the water supply. Olyphant plays David Dutton, the sheriff of the town of Ogden Marsh. Mitchell plays his wife, Judy, who is the town doctor. All of this is established rather well in the first few minutes, and, like many good movies, the action begins on a baseball field.

The zombies in The Crazies aren't traditional zombies. They don't eat brains, they retain full motor skills, and they're by no means undead. They are, however, murderously insane, and are unable to stop themselves from violently killing everyone around them.

Surprisingly little of this violence is shown onscreen. There are plenty of scenes where people are brutally murdered, but the graphic depictions are few and far between. You'll far more often see a charred corpse or a sliced-up body than an actual penetration by foreign object, the exception being bullets. Zombies in this movie are notably capable of wielding guns.

The majority of the suspense comes not from a constant fear of crazies, but from the paranoia that the characters you're watching may already be crazies. The ways that people become infected are never explicitly revealed, so there's no definite way of telling whether or not someone is a carrier, and plenty of the conflicts come from suspicion and fear of the people around them.

It's the rare horror movie with a deeper meaning. When it's not commenting on the ways the government, it's satirizing the relationships people have with their neighbors. There's some hard-hitting social commentary, but it thankfully takes a backseat to the action during the scenes where it counts.

The cinematography is very pretty. I've seldom seen rural Iowa portrayed to beautifully, especially in a horror movie, but some of the scenes had an elegance to them that deserves mention. It's certainly a far prettier movie than Legion, which was set in a similar location.

It's corny at times. There are moments towards the beginning that show the town of Ogden Marsh from the perspective of a US Army satellite, which feels ham-handed and goofy. In a movie that explicitly shows soldiers telling people why the government is invading a rural Iowa town, it's kind of unnecessary to have any scenes at all from the government's perspective. It adds a sense of obviousness that undermines the otherwise very subtle direction.

The Crazies has jump scares occasionally, but the majority of the scares come from the tension and fear of the infection. It's definitely a refreshing and pleasing addition to the genre, especially as a remake.

(Nick Shuler is a senior at Wando High School, and has written countless reviews for the school's newspaper, the Tribal Tribune, for which he is an editor.)