-By Maitland McDonagh

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Welcome to bucolic Ogden Marsh, Iowa, pop. 1260. The countryside is beautiful and the farmland is fertile; folks are friendly and the pace of life is comfortably slow. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) rarely has more on his plate than out-of-season duck hunters, teenage mischief and the occasional drunk-and-disorderly. His wife, Dr. Judy Dutton (Radha Mitchell), is newly pregnant and everything’s right with the world…until it isn’t.

On the opening day of high-school baseball season, longtime town drunk Rory Hamill (Mike Hickman) walks onto the field with a loaded shotgun; David fails to talk Rory down and is forced to kill him. The strange thing is that Rory’s wife swears he had been sober for two years, and the medical examiner’s report bears out her assertion.

Judy, meanwhile, is puzzling over the case of farmer Bill Farnum (Brett Rickaby), whose worried wife Deardra (Christie Lynn Smith) insists that something’s just not right; though Farnum seems physically fine, Judy has a nagging feeling that Deardra’s suspicions are well-founded. That night, Farnum burns his home to the ground, with his wife and son inside. Locked up in the station’s holding cell, Farnum’s not-rightness is more apparent by the hour, and David plans to have him transferred to big-city Cedar Rapids.

But the following day, some local good ol’ boys find a corpse in a nearby swamp, still harnessed to a parachute; David and Russell Clank (Joe Anderson) find a submerged plane nearby. What it was carrying is anybody’s guess, but no one reported the plane missing and the swamp drains directly into Ogden Marsh’s water supply. David and Russell return to find any connections to the outside world severed: landlines, cell-phones, Internet…all dead. And then all hell breaks loose: Their friends and neighbors become bloodthirsty monsters and a military task force swoops in to contain the ever-worsening situation.

There was no reason to expect The Crazies would be any better than dozens of other amped-up, dumbed-down Hollywood horror remakes. Co-writer Scott Kosar had a hand in the dismal do-overs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror; his partner, Ray Wright, helped transform J-horror classic Pulse into a generic “pretty young people in peril” picture, and director Breck Eisner’s biggest previous credit was the dismal action comedy Sahara.

But The Crazies is scary as hell: The small-town setting never feels condescendingly symbolic, the characters are actually characters—thanks in large part to the above-average cast—and the escalating tension hinges on the fact that the line between abnormal behavior triggered by extreme stress and the warning signs of infection is blurred and constantly shifting. And if the notion of germ-warfare mishaps and government cover-ups is less shocking than it once was, it’s because today’s reality bears an unnerving resemblance to yesterday’s paranoid fantasy.

Fans of Romero’s original will be pleased by the remake’s subtle callouts to its predecessor, notably a haunting cameo by ’70s exploitation favorite Lynn Lowry and a brief mention of the toxin’s code name: “Trixie.”