The movie starts and OH SHIT, EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE!!! Flash back two days earlier. It's the opening day of high school baseball, and the whole town is out to take in America's past-time. This is where shit start's to get crazy (pun)- bold move on the films part by starting everything off so soon.
Everything is fine, until a guy shows up in center field with a shotgun. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) approaches him, but ends up having to gun him down cause the dude almost got trigger happy on him. The next act of violence comes when a guy lights his house on fire while his wife and son are locked in a closet- the arsonist gets locked up by the sheriff and his first mate, Russel Clank (Joe Anderson).
These two random acts of violence come from guys who were, up to this point, a pair of regular Joe's. The only sign was that right before the killings they seemed... out of it? Staring off into space, acting tired and bored- kind of like someone who watches Carlos Mencia do comedy; Not interested at all.
Next, we see some redneck types trekking through a swamp where they find a body, submerged in water but attached to a parachute. The dead guy was a fighter pilot from the looks of it, and we soon learn there was a plane crash somewhere near the town- how no one heard/saw a fucking plane crash (especially a fighter jet) is beyond me.
Sheriff Dutton thinks that maybe the plane crash has something to do with the two men acting crazy, and he thinks that since the plane crashed in the water, there might be something in the water supply doing it. Here's where I call bullshit. No fucking redneck cop is going to figure that out before the 15 minute mark of a movie. John McClane couldn't even figure that out, and he killed Hans Gruber (Die Hard reference ftw).
So the arsonist is locked up, Dutton thinks things have gone awry since the plane crash, and all of a sudden... the town is quiet. Too quite... OH SHIT, ZOMBIES!!! Well, that's sort of how it happens. No one is really a zombie, they certainly look like they are the living dead, but they still have all the basic functions- let me put it this way, they can still shoot guns and speak to you: this is not going to be a good apocalypse.
So it turns out it was something in the water and eventually the government steps in, scoops everyone up, quarantines them in the high school-turned-concentration camp, starts killing people who have the signs of being infected... and then still kills the uninfected. Dutton and a handful escape and the movie takes its normal twists and turns- run, escape from the bad guys, try and get out of town and all that good stuff.
Cut scenes throughout the move show that someone is watching the town via satellites- these are the same individuals who presumably cut out any internet/phone service the town had, "quarantine" everyone and cruise around in black SUVs. Typical Big Brother/Secret Government stuff, which we see unravel as the movie goes on.
The story on this movie was pretty good good and certainly a unique one- the government lets a virus/biological weapon loose on a small town via an accidental plane crash (although I'm skeptical at how accidental it really is) and goes in to clean it up by killing literally everything in the region (the films ends with an atomic bomb explosion... just like Driving Miss Daisy).
I'd say the scariest part is when Dutton's wife gets separated from the Sheriff at the camp (because they think she's infected due to elevated temperature, but she's just pregnant) and carted down the halls of the high school, which has been turned into a makeshift hospital. Everyone in the rooms around her are zombies and getting shot, and she's just screaming and screaming. Everyone is dressed in giant bio-hazard suits- it's truly a creepy scene. It reminded me of the end in Jacob's Ladder, when Tim Robbins is getting carted through the "hospital".
There's a lot of scenes where you can tell the good guys will get saved at the last minute, typical Hollywood fashion, but it was still an enjoyable and moderately scary flick. Olyphant (Hitman) and Anderson (Across the Universe) had a decent performance, but this isn't going to stand out from their previous work.
3 out of 5
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