Little Big Screen: 'The Crazies' and other horror-thrillers streaming this July that hit too close to home

Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell in the 2010 remake of ‘The Crazies.’

Little Big Screen is a new column for LV movie lovers that will run monthly online. Look for highlights of the best streaming content available, selected to complement the outstanding curation of our local independent cinema (scroll to the end or click here).

I’ve been keeping a tab open on Culligan.com. This page, held in limbo for who knows how long, has a big blue button telling me to schedule a consultation for something called a reverse osmosis system. I always appreciate the button’s even tenor, bordering on bedside manner — especially in comparison to the headlines (Disastrous figures show the poverty of Iowa’s water quality approach) and news copy (“a cancer common in farm country”) that tell me basically the same thing.

The cutting-edge filtration system for worry-free drinking water would cost a couple thousand dollars. So I don’t know how many million pounds of nitrate run-off will need to pollute Iowa’s taps before I finally call the Culligan Man. In the meantime, to kinda-sorta cope, Little Big Screen has a stack of dirty water movies to stream this month.

The Crazies (2010)

Directed by Breck Eisner

America Needs Farmers … to maybe lay off the murdering in this remake of George Romero’s 1973 eco-horror classic. One farmhouse set piece gives us what’s gotta be the remake’s most brutal image: A farmer isn’t acting right. His wife and kid have to hide from him in a closet. The farmer’s footsteps find them anyway. But he doesn’t open the door. He locks them in there, pours kerosene all over the place, then lights his home and family on fire. The last thing we see is the death rattle of that locked door knob.

Set in the made-up town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, but actually shot on location in Lenox, The Crazies is a pretty good picture of a small town — as long as you can get past the unbelievable number of hot people. We meet the hottest of them all, the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant), at a high school baseball game. That’s when a man wanders into centerfield, kind of like “Shoeless” Joe in Field of Dreams, except this guy’s got a blank look on his face and a shotgun in his hand. The hot sheriff shoots him dead somewhere around second base.

Of course, the homicidal mania isn’t the fault of the farmer or “Brainless” Joe. Some sort of biological weapon has been spilled into Ogden Marsh’s water supply, and masked feds arrive to quote-unquote contain the problem. These big-government baddies look a little cliché, like if a Slipknot music video dared to imagine Ronald Reagan’s greatest fear, but I mean, the un-unseeable sight of a concentration camp set up on a football field is gnarly no matter what. And I felt like the effect — more The Fugitive than Invasion of the Body Snatchers — hit harder than the go-for-it gore of a crazed farmer pitching internal organs like bales of hay.

This Crazies is a riff for sure, with themes, motifs, etc. that’ve been done before, both by Romero and many others. But it’s big and broad in the right way, totally able to take on new meaning. If you haven’t seen this movie since it came out in 2010, see what you think of it in 2024, now that we know what’s in the water, and now that we’ve seen the crazies at school board meetings.

Stream it on The Roku Channel.

Dark Waters (2019)

Directed by Todd Haynes

Dark Waters is the true story about the Teflon inside all of us. The film opens with a setup you’ve seen before: Naked bodies getting into a body of water. The camera watches them swim from beneath the surface — but this isn’t the same POV shot you’ve seen in Jaws and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Because here, the monster isn’t in the water. The monster is the water.

The dread builds as we wait for Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a corporate defense attorney, to catch up with Wilbur Tennant, a West Virginia farmer, whose land neighbors a DuPont dumping ground. Tennant has collected and cataloged the horrors inflicted upon his cattle by the chemical giant, including gallbladders as green as aliens and river rocks somehow bleached by their own stream. Their polluted hues hang over the whole film, each scene doused in a gasoline sheen until the yellow paper on legal pads mutates into the shade of digested bile.

The result is too bleak to be another Erin Brokovich. Even the Hollywood of it all is diseased by the end. In what should be a big Oscar swing between Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway, the performances are blunted by the background: Benihana.

(Also, when you get to the 1999 Ohio Chemical Alliance Dinner, look for the lawyer sitting next to Hathaway — the man who’s having trouble hearing her. That’s Barry Bernson, a University of Iowa grad who spent decades doing broadcast news, then retired, got into screen acting, and snagged roles in Todd Haynes and Yorgos Lanthimos films. Go Hawks.)

Stream it on Netflix.

The Host (2006)

Directed by Bong Joon-ho

The first few minutes of The Host were inspired by the 2000 conviction of a U.S. Army mortician who got caught dumping a bunch of toxic chemicals into the Han River. The incident could be used as a tidy metaphor for many things but certainly none better than this monster genre mash from Bong Joon-ho. Where the story goes from there reminded me, and my red-white-and-blue brain, of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, with the first monster attack captured from ground-level, like the arrival of the aliens. Except we’ve got Song Kang-ho (the dad from Parasite) running around instead of Tom Cruise. And you know, I’ve also gotta say, it’s kind of nice to be up against a monster — not multinational or microscopic but big and gross — that you can see with your own two eyes.

Stream it on Hulu.

The Grapes of Death (1978)

Directed by Jean Rollin

I love a movie title so good that you’ve just gotta watch it — and embrace being reduced to someone who does judge a book by its cover. The Grapes of Death, which is actually called Les Raisins de la Mort, has not one but two good titles, so you’re gonna go in wanting to like it. The plot is thin, thankfully: A vineyard’s choice of pesticide poisons their grapes and turns an entire town into ghouls, then one unlucky young woman (Marie-Georges Pascal) stumbles upon said nightmare in the middle of nowhere. The Grapes of Death holds you at a dreamlike distance as the woman goes door to door looking for human help, almost like the landscape is a level in a video game. But don’t worry, beyond the beauty that oozes from the French countryside, there’s plenty of nasty blisters and crafty puss as payoff.

Stream it on Kanopy.