This is a busy year for George Romero. Only two years removed from his last zombie epic, Diary of the Dead, Romero has been making the rounds at film festivals with his latest zombie flick, Survival of the Dead. However, there's another Romero movie out there as well, a remake of Romero's 1973 movie The Crazies, though Romero is only serving as Executive Producer. Breck Eisner (Sahara) is directing this Crazies from a script by Ray Wright (Pulse) and, no stranger to remakes, Scott Kosar (The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
While the remake is similar in plot to the original — townspeople slowly go insane after a contaminant is released in the city's water supply — both the new poster and the trailer of the remake look ironically more in keeping with the zombie genre than the Romero original, which focused more on the military's inability to control the situation than infected people chasing the non-infected.
The Crazies has a solid cast of horror actors with Timothy Olyphant (Scream 2), Radha Mitchell (Surrogates), Danielle Panabaker (Friday the 13th), and Justin Welborn (The Final Destination), and unlike Survival of the Dead, which is still currently seeking domestic distribution, The Crazies already has a release date in 2010's horror season. You know, February, the month where studios decide to release all their genre pictures to counteract the Oscar hangover.
Enjoy the trailer below: