I can already see the fire in the eyes of all devoted George Romero fans when they read this title. If you've been following my blog from its inception, you would know that I think very highly of Mr. Romero. His Living Dead series was the first thing I ever reviewed on here and his original Living Dead trilogy was part of my 101 Favorite Horror Films. I also think that his 1982 anthology Creepshow is a very fun movie as well. But, as with all great filmmakers, the guy has made some turkeys along with his indisputable classics and, in my opinion, The Crazies is one of them. I first heard of it when it was briefly mentioned in the documentary on the Ultimate Edition DVD of Dawn of the Dead in order to shed light on the films that Romero made in the time period between that film and Night of the Living Dead. They showed a brief clip from the trailer, with the guys in the white bio-suits with gas masks gunning down a bunch of people in a field. It looked interesting but I didn't anything more of it until I started listening to Deadpit.com. CK and Uncle Bill told me personally that The Crazies might be one of Romero's non-Living Dead movies that could be worth my time. I finally saw it when I got a used DVD of it at McKay's in Chattanooga. It was only $11.00 but I still felt ripped off. I can safely say that when I watched this movie one night shortly after getting the DVD, it was one of the most excruciating 102 minutes I have ever spent watching a movie. This movie really lives up to its title. It goes way too fast to the point where you have no time to get invested in the lead characters and it ends up being a very painfully boring sit.
One night in the small town of Evans City, PA, two young children are messing around when suddenly, their father goes mad and begins tearing their house apart. They also discover that he killed their mother before he eventually sets the house on fire. Two firemen and the pregnant nurse girlfriend of one of them get the call to come to work when the fire is reported and soon, the military rolls into the town and all of the soldiers are wearing biological containment suits with gas masks. It is revealed that a plane carrying a secret biological weapon developed by the military crashed near the town just recently and the virus, codenamed Trixie, has infected the town's water supply. The virus either eventually kills its victims or renders them incurably insane. The military does everything it can to both contain the virus within the perimeters of the town as well as try to find a cure but the hastily put together operation leads to the deaths of many soldiers and civilians and mayhem engulfs the town. The two firemen and the nurse are briefly captured by the military but they, along with a man and his teenage daughter, manage to escape and attempt to take cover in the hills since they don't trust the actions of the military, particularly the firemen, who are ex-Vietnam veterans. The rest of the film centers on the group's attempts to get away and keep from becoming infected and the military trying to stop the virus from spreading throughout the rest of the country.
This was made in the period between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead where George Romero was attempting to establish his identity as a director who could do other things besides strictly horror films. Funny thing is that The Crazies, up until Dawn of the Dead, was the closest thing to a sequel to Night of the Living Dead that Romero ever produced. It is similar to his zombie movies in that it focuses on people being turned into murderous creatures, a group of people trying to escape the carnage, and, as with most of Romero's films, it has a good amount of political commentary, particularly on the military and the government (although it's much more blatant here and is more in line with his later films rather than his early work). Unfortunately, as we'll get into shortly, I don't think Romero succeeded in that aspect with The Crazies as he did with his original Living Dead films. With the failure of this film, along with his two previous films, There's Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch, with the exception of a couple of documentaries, he wouldn't make another movie until his vampire film Martin in 1976.
My biggest problem with The Crazies is the pace. This thing moves like a car rolling out of control down a hill. It opens with a quickly with an already infected man trashing his house, murdering his wife, and finally setting the house on fire. From there, we're hastily "introduced" to the characters and the situation and the plot is set in motion. You would think that would make the movie exciting and fun but it doesn't. A movie can be boring because it goes too fast as well as because it's too slow and that's what happens here. Moreover, we're introduced to the lead characters so quickly and learn only the basics about them, if that, before they're thrown into the situation. I know Night of the Living Dead had the situation start off quickly from the beginning but we still had lulls to get to know the characters so we could root for them as they tried to face down the zombie menace. This movie's pace is so frantic that we don't have any time to grow close to the characters and therefore, what happens to them means nothing to us. On top of that, after the opening cemetery scene, Night of the Living Dead let us see how dire and serious the zombie outbreak was becoming, with more and more zombies showing up at the farmhouse that served as the main setting of the film as well as news reports on the radio and TV about how the outbreak is happening everywhere. We don't get anything like that in The Crazies. Before we know what's going on, the military takes over the town and starts hunting down and killing the infected people while we only learn about the gravity of the situation from fast-paced, hard to hear dialogue from the military and government officials. Show us, Mr. Romero, don't tell us. On top of that, as if the pacing of this movie wasn't enough to make it completely batshit insane, the editing is nuts too. Most of the cuts don't seem to last longer than ten seconds, if that, and there are also moments where there is insane inter-cutting between a government official describing something and what he's describing being put into action. There is a way of doing that and making it work but it just comes across as clumsy here, as if the editor, which is Romero as well, is having a stroke. The structure also gets monotonous and tiresome after a while. A reviewer on IMDB said it best: the movie repeats scenes of the leads trying to escape the military, the army officers arguing with each other about how ass-backwards the operation is and how nothing is going right, the lead scientist who is trying to find a cure arguing with the Army officers that he doesn't have enough resources or time to do his work properly, and government officials in Washington trying to keep themselves from being publicly embarrassed over and over again to the point where you feel like the story is not progressing at all. In short, the film is just an incomprehensible, fast-paced mess.
Not only are the characters so hastily introduced that it's hard to care for them but it doesn't help that the acting isn't the best either. Lane Carroll (who never worked again after this movie and before it, appeared only in Hercules in New York, Arnold Schwarzenegger's first film, and Romero's There's Always Vanilla) and W.G. McMillan (who's actually appeared in a lot of stuff, mostly TV work, since although this was only his second film) play the film's lead couple, Judy and David. There's not much to say about them. David is the most level-headed member of the on the run civilians whereas Judy really doesn't do much except act as a nurse at the very beginning of the movie before they go on the run (her doctor actually advises both her and David to try to escape the military). Judy is pregnant with David's baby, they're very much in love, and they're determined to make it out alive. But, Judy eventually succumbs to the virus and is killed by a posse, dying in David's arms. Also, in an ironic twist of fate, David develops a natural immunity to the virus but at the end of the movie when he's finally captured by the military, they don't bother doing an immunity test on him. I did find that to be a wonderful bit of sad irony: a potential cure is right under their noses and they don't even know about it or care to check. There's also Harold Wayne Jones (who only appeared in a few other films and TV stuff, including Romero's Knightriders, after this) as David's friend, Clank, who is part of the same fire brigade that David is and also served in Vietnam, same as him. He kind of looks like David and I wonder if that was intentional, that it was meant to be another link between the two, even though their personalities are different. It's hinted at in his first scene that Clank also has feelings for Judy and is maybe a tad bit jealous that she didn't pick him as a lover. He's also much more hot-headed and impulsive than David, which is acerbated when he contracts the virus. He starts gunning down soldiers left and right and acts in a kind of schizophrenic way. He even goes so far as to attack David near the end of the film when he realizes that he and Judy tried to leave him behind. He's eventually killed by the military. Again, while the acting by these three characters is not bad, it's still amateurish and, again, coupled with how hastily they're introduced, makes it hard for me to really care for them.
Now Artie and his daughter Kathy are two characters that I can honestly say I didn't like. Artie is played by the late Richard Liberty, who would go on to play the mad Dr. Logan in Day of the Dead. While Liberty's performance in that movie is wonderfully entertaining in how over the top it is, here he's playing a creepy, sleazy man who has lost his wife and is left with only his daughter, whom it is revealed he has sick sexual feelings for. I don't know if it's because he thinks she's his wife in his delusional mind, judging from how he calls her by his wife's name at one point, or if he just harbors sick fantasies about her period, although it's probably as a direct result of the virus, but whatever the case, he actually attempts to have sex with her. He's stopped by Clank but still, that's just messed up. Personally, I wonder if Artie already had these sick thoughts and the virus just brought them up to the surface. In any case, he hangs himself after his rape attempt is foiled. Now, Lynn Lowry (who appeared in stuff like I Drink Your Blood before this and would go on to be in David Cronenberg's first feature film, Shivers, and Paul Schrader's remake of Cat People) annoyed the crap out of me as Kathy. This virus makes men go crazy but it seems to make women childlike and annoying (it does the same thing to Judy near the end and her death is her own stupid fault as a result). Kathy just aggravates me in this film due to her annoying, childlike way of speaking, her almost getting them shot by the soldiers, and her death is her own fault because she wanders out in a field in front of a bunch of soldiers. You just can't make me care about someone if the virus they get makes them act annoying and stupid. She also has one of the most hilariously bad death scenes ever. She gets shot, spins around, and simply says, "Oh," before keeling over. I don't know what Romero was thinking when he had her act like that but I just couldn't take it seriously.
I thought Lloyd Hollar was fine as Col. Peckem, who's trying his best to maintain order in the chaos-ridden town but knows that the chance of this town surviving the situation is slim to non-existent. By the end of the movie, he's completely disconcerted and despondent when he's called away to another town that's possibly infected with the virus. The way he reacts, you know that he feels that it's probably never going to end no matter what he tries to do. The ending scene with him being airlifted out of the town and looking down upon the chaos that has completely devastated it is quite well done and would be even more powerful if the rest of the movie had been as effective. Another character that I also kind of enjoyed was Richard France (who would go on to play the eye-patch wearing scientist on the TV in Dawn of the Dead) as the frustrated Dr. Watts. I found him to be funny and he kind of unintentionally sounded like me voicing my complaints about the film itself. In his introductory scene, he's complaining about how the army is forcing him to go to Evans City even though he's confident that he could do more productive work at the base and when the soldiers say that they can't do anything about it, he yells, "This is so random!" I was thinking, "Tell me about it, man!" Even later, he's saying stuff akin to, "This is a mess!" and so on and, again, I'm like, "Right on." I also laughed at how, after being unable to look through a microscope with the helmet of his bio-suit on, he decides to heck with it and takes it off, even though he could be risking infecting himself. His last scene is also another one of the few I actually liked, where he finds a cure for the virus but when he tries to get out of the building, the soldiers think he's one of the infected because he's not wearing a bio-suit and they try to quarantine him. He's trampled by a stampede of the infected and is killed as a result and the cure is destroyed. It's another bit of sad irony that the military have unknowingly helped to destroy what chance they had of stopping the virus. The last character of note is Harry Spillman as Maj. Ryder, the initial man who is in charge of the operation until Col. Peckem arrives. He's just doing his job and himself is unaware of the true nature of the situation until Peckem actually tells him. When he is told, he feels like a fool that he bought the cover-up story of the situation. Not much else to say about him. I also must briefly mention Will Disney (I doubt he was related to Walt) as Dr. Brookmyre, the kindly doctor who tells Judy that she and David must get away from the army for the sake of the baby. He's not that noteworthy of a character but he's obviously a decent person due to his concern for the couple.
It's obvious that the film is meant to be about how one can't trust the American government and the military. The original script for the film by Paul McCollough only focused on the military aspect of the story at the beginning of it but the producer of the film, Lee Hessel, asked Romero to re-write it to where it focused much more on that aspect. For me, this is another problem about the movie. They should have focused on the characters who are trying to escape the military occupation of the town or focus on a heroic member of the army who is trying to find a cure for the virus (like the movie Outbreak) instead of going back and forth between the two subplots because, like I said, it gets monotonous and repetitive after a while. Also, when Romero attempts to do political statements and social satire in a subtle way while focusing mainly on making a good movie, it's entertaining; however, when he makes it so blatant that it feels like you're being beaten over the head with it, as in his later Living Dead films and Bruiser, it can be insufferable. While the obvious commentary in The Crazies didn't aggravate me too much and I didn't think it was the film's biggest problem by far, I still think it's one of the examples of Romero being unable to do it subtly. There are so many scenes with the military and government officials trying to find a way to cover their ass about the bio-weapon that I was like, "Okay, I get it. You feel that we can't trust the military and that our government officials lie." I felt the same way about his criticism of the media in Diary of the Dead: "Okay, the media can be bad and corrupted. I understand." Romero even makes the president of the United States look like a Bond villain or something, with his back to the camera, smoking a cigar and speaking in a voice that sounds shady (but then again, this was during the era of Richard Nixon so maybe it was justified). I thought the best part of the commentary was the scenes I described where the military unknowingly helps destroy a potential cure for the virus and later, they ignore another one. That was nice and subtle, that the military doesn't realize that it's doing more harm than good. I also thought the images of the soldiers in faceless, bio-containment suits would have been a subtle enough jab at the military. So, while I do see potential in the political statement that Romero is trying to make here, I think the blatant nature of it ultimately overrules the more subtle and well done aspects of it.
The makeup effects in this movie are fine and do their job. This was before Romero started working with Tom Savini so the effects here are not quite up to the standard put forth in the movies they would do together but since this isn't a zombie movie, there's no need for graphically over the top blood-splatters and the like. It's mainly consists of squibs with blood packs in them that result in some fairly graphic gunshots, some corpses getting burnt, a priest setting himself on fire which is fairly gruesome and disturbing, and, most gruesome of all, ripped open necks and head getting blown off. The effects are fine but they're really quick and the blood is that bright red, almost orange, blood that would later turn up in Dawn of the Dead that isn't very realistic when you get down to it. The infected people themselves don't look much different than normal people. It's all in the way they act. So, while there are some makeup effects here, they're just standard but simply serve their purpose in this type of movie.
Like the structure of the movie, the music by Bruce Roberts is very repetitive and monotonous. The bit that is repeated over and over and over again is the sound of these marching drums used to signify the military. You hear it so many times over the course of the movie that you really get tired of it. There are also some instrumental versions of military themes that play over the music as well as some bits with a singer vocalizing. In all honesty, the score is nothing to write home about in the slightest. There is a song called God Help Us that plays over the ending credits, though, that I felt was effective in showing the hopelessness of it all as Col. Peckem looks down on the town and sees how it is now in absolute shambles. As I've said, it's too bad the rest of the movie is so unremarkable because if it had been more powerful, that song would have hit home even more so.
Some may feel that The Crazies is an overlooked gem in George Romero's filmography but to me, it should have stayed obscure. It has some good points to it but for the most part, it's a fast-paced, frantic, confusing mess of a film that doesn't give you enough time to grow close to the lead characters, doesn't build the situation up well, has a monotonous, repetitive structure, and has some political commentary that is so blatant and in your face that it overshadows the more subtle and well done aspects of it. Every director, no matter how good, is going to make some bad movies and in my opinion, this is one of Romero's, made in-between two of his truly watershed films. Though, as I say, you can sort of see The Crazies as a cousin to Romero's zombie films as well as a precursor to 28 Days Later and the like. But, the reason the zombie films work is because they're simple whereas this is far too complex. Bottom line, I know this movie has fans and I respect that. I would never try to take that away from you. To me, though, The Crazies is just that: it's way too crazy for its own good and it cripples what could have been an interesting movie.
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