Returning to the horror
genre after a detour into romantic comedy, Pittsburgh-based indie icon George A. Romero cranked
out two shockers in 1973, including this bio-terror flick and the
quasi-supernatural melodrama Season of
the Witch. Neither represents the filmmaker’s best work, although it’s easy
to spot within The Crazies many
tropes that fans adore in Romero’s zombie flicks. Like The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, The Crazies focuses on a small band of
survivors who find themselves caught between a mysterious plague and the
overzealous military personnel assigned to contain the plague. The cure, as the
saying goes, is worse than the disease.
Shot throughout rural Pennsylvania, The Crazies begins with a gruesome scene
of a crazed man murdering his wife and burning down his house with his children
inside. Next, the picture cuts to a local clinic, where a small-town doctor
treats the crazed man even as soldiers show up at the clinic door. It seems an
experimental biological weapon was accidentally released, and that most people
exposed to the chemical agent will become psychotic. Our heroes include the nurse and several other people with natural immunity. Using local
actors instead of Hollywood players, Romero creates a sense of documentary-like
realism, an effect accentuated by his unglamorous camerawork.
At its best, The Crazies feels like a newsreel capturing the end of man. However, the use
of semiprofessional actors frequently backfires, with many scenes falling flat
due to inert performances, and Romero spends so much time cutting back and
forth between underdeveloped characters that The Crazies unspools more like a series of loosely connected
vignettes than an actual story. Some of the stuff in the movie is effective,
some is merely gross, and some is genuinely disturbing, but the sum effect is
less than Romero could have achieved by applying more discipline to his
storytelling. Even the juiciest subplot, stemming from the realization that one
of the “immune” survivors has turned psycho because the virus took a while to
infect his bloodstream, feels predictable.
Still, this
subject matter exists solidly within Romero’s wheelhouse, and the notion of an
airborne toxin changing normal people into murderers is unsettling no matter
the context. And despite failing to cause a stir during its original release, The Crazies eventually gained enough
stature to earn a 2010 remake starring Timothy Olyphant.
The Crazies: FUNKY
2 comments:
The Crazies is actually one of Romero's better films, and it's actually pretty good----the actor playing the scientist is really good, even though he really goes over the top the whole time he's onscreen. The actor playing the military man who's trying like hell to keep everything in order and rescue people is also really good. One thing I've noticed about Romero's films is that very few movie stars came out of his films---not sure why that was.
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