The Crazies/La Nuit des fous vivants

The Night of the Crazy Living

I fancied watching the Crazies the second I saw the trailer months ago.

I wasn't aware then that it was the remake of a 1973 Romero film until I read this article. So I went to see the film last night and really enjoyed it. 
My friend admitted that he had been entertained by my jumping out of my chair at particularly tense moments ("I hate when I know I'm going to jump but they still manage to scare the hell out of me" I explained when we got out).  
The Crazies starts by a burning house, with a "2 days earlier" flashback, when little town sheriff David Dutton (awesome Timothy Olyphant) shoots Rory "the town drunk" dead because he walked onto the town baseball pitch during a game with a shotgun and looks all crazed and like he was going to shoot the sheriff and maybe also the deputy. 
Then, little by little, all the inhabitants start acting weird. Turns out there's a plane that has crashed in the marsh and that it has some chemical weapons on board and that it's now affected the town water supply.

(New and old poster, I like the gas mask theme)

Everyone goes mental but for the Sheriff, his pregnant wife, her assistant and the deputy, whose one liners provide some much appreciated tension alleviating giggles. They get taken by the military, try to escape town, and it all slowly builds up in shock and horror until the final sequence and the open ending.

The story line seems familiar, but I am not sure if it's because of the recent truck loads of similarly-themed films (Dawn of the dead, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, etc.) or if it is because I saw the Romero film some time ago.

Apparently, the main difference between the new version and the original one is the fact that one plot in the original follows the military, the other the townsfolk, while the new film is seen through the sheriff and his wife's point of view, and you only pick information about what's happening as they go along. 

The crazies is how the military nickname the townsfolk.

The original was "translated" into French as "La Nuit des fous vivants" or The Night of the Crazy Living. (I don't think new version has been released in France yet, as I can't see a translation for it anywhere, so we'll just talk about the original film from this point onwards).

The only explanation I can come up with at this stage is the clear reference to Romero's first film, Night of the Living Dead/La Nuit des morts vivants. This being a clear Rule 4 example ("Thou shall refer to a previous title in order to establish that this new film is part of the genre or family that the older film belongs to.")

But why? It's not like the Crazies is a follow up to Night of the Living Dead! Why is it not, you ask? Well, despite the obvious theme of people changing state, becoming barely human and killing others, the crazies aren't dead people coming back from the dead! Therefore, it's not a zombie film. And substituting "dead" for "crazy" does not make for a good translation. 

(I'll never watch a garden fork without a shiver again)

I am not going into the "turning an adjective into a noun is not grammatically correct" argument and say that I don't know how the title could have been accurately translated anyway. Because I do (Smartass, I hear you say?) French use the same word for noun and adjective: fou.

So they could either have called the film "Les Fous" (correct) or be inventive and yet kept the same idea of grammatical rebellion and called the film "Les Foux" (yup, a single letter makes the whole difference). But obviously, they did not bother thinking that much...

So how are we going to call the French translators who had the honour of dealing with this title? The lazies?

Other suggestions welcome...