Question: when is a zombie not a zombie? Answer: when it’s a crazy. To make things a tad more confusing, the king of zombie films George A Romero made the original film of the same name in 1973, and it was one of those rare things for him, a non zombie film. So what the hell are crazies?

The easiest explanation is to think of crazies as vegetarian zombies, but with better skin.

Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is a small, sleepy community that quite happily goes about its business with little fuss or bother. During a baseball game however, one of its residents walks onto the pitch, shotgun in hand, without saying a word. When confronted by local sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), the man raises his weapon to shoot him. In self defence, the sheriff has to pull the trigger first and kill his attacker.

God, this is about as embarrassing as a fancy dress party can get. I knew I should have gone for the Captain Sparrow costume.

Dutton puts the strange change in behaviour down to the possibility that the man, who used to enjoy a drink, had fallen off the wagon. But when results come back that he was clean sober, the sheriff steps up his investigation.

With more and more reports of strange behaviour within the town, Dutton believes that there’s something in the water that shouldn’t be there. He’s not alone in this theory. Before you can say ‘outbreak’, the town is swarmed by gas-masked troops, who attempt to quarantine the sane from the Lady Ga Gas.

With his wife running a temperature, which is an early sign of being infected, the pair are separated at a make-shift camp. However, her fever is less likely due to her being loco and more to do with the fact that she’s pregnant. Dutton is all up for getting out of Dodge, but with rescuing his wife, avoiding the crazies, red-necks and armed troops, it’s not going to be easy.

Despite some nice set pieces that are just riddled with tension, director Breck Eisner’s film suffers from zombie-envy. It’s like having a film about a group who are like vampires, but instead of drinking your blood, will just tut angrily at you as you pass them by. As crazed as the community gets, the fact that they don’t get hungry enough to tear off the limbs of others for a snack, makes them disappointing foes.

What’s worse, if you shoot them, they stay dead – not even a little twitch.

Despite being a re-make of a film, The Crazies feels more like a cross-over between the game Left 4 Dead and the BBC 1 series Survivors, in that It’s great at creating a community that is insular from the outside world.

Unlike other films that have used the media’s coverage of the event to help the narrative along, the film includes a brief snippet of news feed only during the end credits. This helps to convey the sense of total isolation within the town.

Olyphant puts in a great performance as the town’s sheriff; whether it’s quite enough to kick start the Deadwood actor’s film career will remain to be seen. He couldn’t ask for a better taster of his talents though.

Anyone expecting a shlock horror-fest will be disappointed. In its defence, it is only rated 15. And to its credit, it has more than its fair share of seat-jumping moments. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t bring anything new to the non-zombie genre, and by not doing so, it lacks one essential ingredient: bite.