Films That Witness Madness

review

THE CRAZIES

Is it still fair to call George Romero's 1973 shocker THE CRAZIES a neglected film? After all, the film is soon to be issued on Blu-ray, enjoyed good reviews when Blue Underground released it on DVD and - surprise, surprise - has been remade. With it now in the public eye in a big way, why hasn't THE CRAZIES been reconsidered by the majority of horror fans? I, for one, have no idea. I was convinced of the film's quality from my first viewing of it on VHS back in the early 90s. It is one of Romero's best films made during his most fruitful decade of filmmaking. It contains seeds that would soon flower in DAWN OF THE DEAD and takes the underlying narrative of his earlier zombie epic, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, in a bold new direction.

A military plane has crashed outside of a small town. The cargo, a new and dangerous biological weapon called TRIXIE, was spilled into the town's water supply. Now the people of the town are starting to act a bit strange. People are beginning to lose their minds, becoming either giggling maniacs or raving psychopaths. The military scrambles into town, setting up road blocks and barricades. Martial law is declared and all the citizens are being rounded up and forced into a local high school for observation. A few stragglers - ex-Army buddies David and Clank, David's pregnant wife Judy and a father and his daughter - make an escape in a military van, trying to remain under the radar at a farmhouse in hopes that this will all pass.

Unlike an army of walking corpses shambling down city streets, the situation presented in THE CRAZIES is completely believable. And so is the outcome. We've seen this kind of thing already when Katrina struck. We had the reasonable expectation of an event happening but no one thought it would. When the shit finally hit the fan, the people who should have been the most ready to act - and act decisively - were not and things spiraled out of control so quickly that the damage was catastrophic. Romero paints his film with chaos. At first, we have no idea what is happening. Events just snowball. By the time the military has arrived to contain the situation, our brains are already fried by the rapid fire editing, conflicting points of view and overwhelming amount of information we're receiving. Once we've gotten a grasp of the situation, Romero keeps the tension up by having large groups of characters talking over one another and multiple characters coming and going, shouting and generally spazzing out. We can feel the tensions beginning to come to a slow, rolling boil. By the time martial law is declared, it's boiled over into chaos. Miscommunication, as is often the case in Romero films, brings about disaster.

By the halfway mark, we can no longer tell who is sick and who is healthy. We're constantly guessing. How can you tell if you're going mad if your whole world has gone mad? Are the characters cracking up because of a mysterious contagion or are they merely cracking under the stress of their situation? It's a fascinating idea that Romero never really utilizes to it's fullest possible effect. In fact, one of the reasons why THE CRAZIES doesn't attain the same air of greatness that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD does is because Romero sells himself short in the end. Unable or unwilling to bring himself to take the story to it's obvious end, Romero instead wraps the film up in a completely perfunctory way. It's a shame as, up until this point, THE CRAZIES has been a refreshing blast of fresh air.

THE CRAZIES contains some of Romero's strongest visuals and most memorable scenes. The opening scene recalls the opening of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD except that it ends in a more horrific manner. The gun-wielding military men, all wearing white decontamination suits and gas masks, skulking through the woods are more frightening than any zombie horde. The priest dousing himself with kerosene and lighting himself on fire on the Church lawn recalls the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in protest of the Vietnam war. The final scenes of the riot inside the high school, Lynn Lowry's surprisingly touching death scene and the tense encounter at a construction site... these are all wonderful scenes that bear witness to the fact that Romero used to be - and, in some ways, still is - one of the truly great directors in the horror genre and, while it might not be as violent or flat-out fun as his zombie films, THE CRAZIES remains one of his strongest statements in the genre.

Highly recommended.

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