A COSY Midwestern town, population 1,260 – and rapidly depleting – is the pleasantly green and tranquil setting for a bloodthirsty apocalypse in The Crazies.

The film is executive produced by George A Romero, who redefined the horror genre with Night Of The Living Dead.

And Breck Eisner's suspenseful yarn pays homage to the 1968 zombie classic, with experimental bio-weapons as the contemporary trigger for the mayhem.

Ignoring the terrible title, The Crazies sustains tension well and peppers the escape from the quarantined town with lots of shocks to ensure more popcorn ends up on the floor than in your mouth.

Eisner, who directed Sahara, skilfully orchestrates the action sequences.

A fight in a mortuary involving a small, electrical saw will have men in the audience wincing with sympathy pains.

And a showdown in an automatic car wash uses soap suds on the windshield to effectively conceal an attack from one of the infected until the very last moment.

The film opens with a raging inferno sweeping through Ogden Marsh.

Then it rewinds two days to meet Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), who presides over the God-fearing residents with his deputy, Russell (Joe Anderson).

An unfortunate incident on the baseball field casts a dark shadow over the picture postcard town, but this is just the start of the nightmare.

Family man Bill Farnum (Brett Rickaby) commits a horrific act against his wife Deardra (Christie Lynn Smith) and child (Preston Bailey), and is thrown in the police cells.

The change in the temperament of friends and neighbours troubles David, and he discovers the answer in the local creek which feeds into the water supply.

Before he can contain the problem, masked soldiers storm the town.

Judy is condemned to isolation with the other infected residents.

But the sheriff refuses to leave his wife, and embarks on a suicide rescue mission.

The Crazies should satiate the blood lust of horror fans, as large numbers of residents are culled by gun, kitchen knife, garden fork and flame thrower.

Meanwhile, Olyphant is a likeable, yet flawed, lead, who allows his love for the people around him to blind him.

The denouement veers wildly toward implausibility to deliver an almighty bang.

But it does neatly set up a potential sequel.