Listed as one of the producers, George Romero apparently bestowed his imprimatur on the remake of his 1973 film "The Crazies," an early work that, like several of his other movies, influences a great many later toilers in the fields of gore. Among his many contributions to horror, including the resurrection of the zombie flick, Romero located his action in the countryside, where sentimental national tradition and right-wing politicians assert the best and truest American people and values reside. The reanimated corpses of the powerfully influential "Night of the Living Dead," staggering slowly across the empty fields toward their banquet of human flesh, tend to discredit that notion, and his skirmish line of good ol' boys gleefully picking off the zombies with their hunting rifles suggests a subtext of racism and rural violence.

Instead of Romero's favorite rustic Pennsylvania, the new movie takes place in one of the favorite regions of America's great heartland, a small town in the middle of the vast cornfields of Iowa, a burg like those immortalized in "Field of Dreams" and "The Bridges of Madison County." In the middle of a high-school baseball game a slovenly figure stumbles across center field, carrying a shotgun; despite several warnings he lifts the weapon, forcing the local sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) to shoot him dead. After that incident, everything goes to hell - a number of people begin to exhibit strange behavior, remaining in fixed positions as if they had fallen into a trance, staring at nothing, exhibiting no emotion, then suddenly exploding into a rage, wielding axes, knives, and shovels against their families, shooting friends, burning down houses, killing anyone they encounter.

Unlike most movie sheriffs, this one soon figures out the reason for the townspeople's behavior, an airplane that crashed into a nearby swamp, apparently carrying some toxin that leaked into the water supply, poisoning the residents. As soon as he attempts to report the information to the authorities in Cedar Rapids, however, he finds all communications blocked. A unit of heavily armed soldiers arrives, cordoning off the town, checking all the citizens for signs of the sickness, bundling the rest into cattle cars, and shooting anyone who resists.

Once establishing that situation, the film settles into a straightforward story of the attempts of the sheriff and his wife (Radha Mitchell), along with a couple of companions, to elude the military, escape the town, and inform the state government. They encounter one obstacle after another, engage in several gunfights, barely escape from both the soldiers and whatever maddened citizens still lurk in the dark corners of barns and farmhouses. They suffer a variety of wounds, kill quite a few people themselves, and stumble upon hundreds of bodies before discovering the source of the poison and the reasons for the military invasion of their peaceful hamlet.

Within an entirely relevant context, like almost any horror flick, good or bad, "The Crazies" follows its own dark logic. It provides a suitable commentary on the methods of modern warfare and the ethics of a government willing to attack its own citizenry in order to protect the nation, a quandary worthy of the tortured arguments of many contemporary conservative thinkers.

In placing its action in and around a one-street town amid the endless cornfields of Iowa, it also reveals the possibility for evil beneath the supposedly peaceful and innocent surface of rural life, the sentimental sham of a thousand political speeches. In one nice touch, the quartet of drunken men hunting out of season who first discover the evidence of a plane crash also turn out to be the only infected citizens who actually enjoy shooting anyone they encounter.

Fans of the outstanding HBO Western series "Deadwood" should be happy to see Timothy Olyphant once again wearing a gun on his hip and representing the law in a later time and a different place. He handles his role as the sheriff with some of the same controlled intensity he displayed in the part of Marshal Seth Bullock; Ogden Marsh, Iowa, however, makes the frontier town of Deadwood seem a quaintly lively place and its citizens a good deal better behaved than the crazies of the great American heartland.