The Crazies: BD Review
|
Page 1 of 3 Blue Underground / 1973 / 103 Minutes / Rated R / Street Date: February 23, 2010
You gotta love independent filmmaker George A. Romero. Apart from being the de facto godfather of the modern zombie film, nobody taps into the collective mob mentality zeitgeist better than he does. His films are replete with groups of people banding together — typically one fending themselves off from the other — fighting the age-old “survival of the fittest” battle. While the bulk of his movies tend to pit decidedly “normal” humans against mindless, flesh-hungry zombies, he’s also dabbled with groups as diverse as vampires, ghosts, demonic spirits and a variety of social pariahs and outcasts. If there’s a unique attribute to what sets his films apart from other such genre pieces, it’s that there’s never a clear delineation between right and wrong, between good and evil. Even though the zombies are reduced to base, animalistic behavior, they still retain a faint semblance of humanity and were once fully human. In the end, Romero’s films are essentially about human beings in all their forms — at their best and at their worst. After the slow and surprising success of his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, Romero attempted to branch out into more mainstream fare by directing the romantic comedy There’s Always Vanilla in 1971, a plodding mess which ultimately flopped. So he decided to fall back on something closer to his zombie debut with his next effort, The Crazies in 1973. While not one of his strongest directorial achievements, The Crazies is an important stepping-stone in his career and clearly serves as a link between the stripped-down, single-location Night of the Living Dead shoot and the more elaborate and quick-paced Dawn of the Dead to come. The Crazies is a clever portrait of paranoia that revolves around a military experiment gone bad: a biological weapon known as “Code Name: Trixie” (one of the film’s original titles) that accidentally gets released in the otherwise idyllic suburban setting of Evans City, Pennsylvania. This unknown, unseen virus infects the inhabitants of this small town and literally drives them insane. Those infected lapse into madness and/or violent, homicidal bursts of rage. It’s a matter of kill or be killed for the entire population of Evans City and the people responsible for creating and unleashing Trixie — the U.S. government — soon come in to quarantine the town until a proper antidote can be administered.
Clearly taking his cue from the social unrest of the early ‘70s and the lasting effects of the Vietnam War, Romero touches a raw nerve with The Crazies that certainly resonates even today — which may bode well for director Breck Eisner’s 2010 remake of the film. Trixie is blatantly modeled after Agent Orange and other suspected chemical weapons of the time and The Crazies’ depiction of brute military force to invade and take over the small Pennsylvania town certainly recalls the 1970 Kent State shootings just three years earlier. Romero is once again pointing his camera lens into the mirror and showing us just what we look like to an objective outsider. The government clearly doesn’t know how to handle the epidemic in Evans City, so they arrive in antiseptic white suits hiding behind gas masks with guns blazing. Kill or be killed, indeed.
As if mimicking the setup of his earlier Night of the Living Dead, Romero focuses on two groups of “human” (i.e. not infected) survivors. David (Will McMillan), his girlfriend Judy (Lane Carroll) and his buddy Clank (Harold Wayne Jones) are among the first in town to suspect something isn’t right. Both David and Clank are Vietnam vets and they begin witnessing strange behavior among their neighbors. Judy is pregnant with David’s child and he fears the worse. When some military suits arrive and take over the doctor’s office where Judy works to set up a command center, they learn all about the Trixie virus that was apparently leaked into the town’s drinking water supply when a plane carrying the toxic material crash-landed nearby. Officials in Washington direct the military to quarantine the town, but behind the scenes they’ve also authorized airborne bombers to be at the ready with nuclear weapons to destroy the town if the quarantine and attempted antidote don’t work.
Of course the citizens of Evans City don’t take kindly to being under the government’s thumb, and when the military soldiers clad in their alien-like hazardous material suits arrive, some of them fight back and rebel — even those who aren’t under the immediate influence of Trixie. Romero uses familiar iconic imagery such as the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk (here it’s a Catholic priest) to further link Trixie to Agent Orange and the Vietnam conflict. But it’s more the general sense of upheaval and rebellion that taps into the whole late ‘60s/early ‘70s counterculture. David, Judy and Clank are soon whisked off in a van along with teenager Kathie (Lynn Lowry) and her father Artie (Richard Liberty, years before his starring role in Romero’s Day of the Dead) and the group soon hatches a plan to escape from the clutches of the military and Evans City. But their rebellion will come at a cost, as the virus begins infecting different members at different stages and they’ll need to conceal who’s “human” and who’s joined the ranks of “the crazies,” as the soldiers have aptly nicknamed the infected insane. Those familiar with Romero’s canon can probably guess not everyone makes it out alive, and the body count continues to rise as the military attempts to keep a lid on the pressure-cooker they’ve created.
Although it’s clearly a lesser entry in Romero’s filmography — mostly due to the budget limitations and a somewhat uneven cast — The Crazies remains an interesting and compulsively watchable movie. Romero’s directing and flawless editing style give the film a great deal of energy and you can see some of the flourishes he’ll use to better effect in his 1978 masterpiece Dawn of the Dead. The movie moves at a brisk pace and Romero is relentless in presenting some of the unnerving bits of violence — from a kind-looking elderly woman repeatedly stabbing one man with a knitting needle to another sequence where a similar old woman attempts to sweep the blood off the grass after a group of soldiers have been shot and killed. All the recurring themes are here: from government intervention to rebellious militant groups to an underlying sense of “us against them.” Although the undead zombies have been supplanted by everyday citizens who have all been unwittingly driven insane by the government — and there’s a telling bit of social commentary right there — the dramatic conflict and battle for survival remains the same. In George A. Romero’s vision of America, you either stand up and fight for yourself, or you simply follow the pack like a bunch of brain-dead zombies. And The Crazies shows just what might happen if we’re all pushed to the brink.
|
Comments (0)