We mentioned George Romero last time, so let’s talk about a somewhat overlooked entry of his that’s become a cult classic of sorts. Thought it didn’t have the blood and gore of his much more famous zombie works, it’s still dripping with the very blunt social commentary that characterized those, and in many ways still resonates over fifty years later—here’s my take on The Crazies.
We kick things off very quickly with family men turning psychotic and burning down their own homes, with a government response soon showing up in a rural town over what turns out to be a bacteriological weapon accidentally released. Turns out ‘Trixie’ is something that turns its infects insane, rendering them into destructive sociopaths—and at a glance they’re all indistinguishable from everyday people, giving this one marked difference between the ‘Dead’ films. What makes this one interesting is that we cover several characters over the proceedings—scientists, citizens, even officials, all of them barely keeping it together.
If there’s another thing that makes this interesting, it’s that it’s steeped in the zeitgeist of 1970s America—one getting to grips with the mess in Vietnam, it being no coincidence here that it’s about a lab-mixed weapon gone out of hand. The authorities here, far from the highly efficient coverups you might expect, are struggling between different agendas as to how to combat the outbreak, with left hands failing to talk to right hands as they themselves start to fray under it all.
It at least keeps things interesting, and you can see it being done in a modern format as a TV show almost. While there’s no fanciful special effects per se, the imagery of white-clad biohazard suit wearing soldiers marching around shooting on sight is a striking one, and one that prevailed into the remake, as we’ll get to. It’s hard to find something else as on the nose about the deterioration of social trust from around here—though some of it unfortunately still applies, which we’ll also get to.
In 2010 we had a remake, starring Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell—the basic gist is the same, except here we narrow the focus to the citizens only, giving us a more down to earth and brutal presentation a modern audience might expect. There’s much more focus on the titular Crazies themselves, but for the most part, I actually enjoyed the remake—it feels more like a compliment than an attempt to replace the original, and those scenes of gas mask visages herding confused and panicked people are arguably more chilling and disturbing than anything else involving deranged townsfolk turned murderers.
On rewatch the last act starts to drag a little, but it has its highlights and is worth a watch—with both films, the uneasy sensation of deja vu creeps over considering recent pandemics, mixed responses to that, and the rise of distrust between sections of society. Both movies look at being unable to trust your neighbor and authority, followed by the logical result of that…the obvious question being, who’s really the more crazy?
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