Horror has always had it’s more than its fair share of social commentary, but the 70s was it’s own animal entirely. Fueled by the anti-establishment antics of young, up and coming filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, primitive, yet primal fright films such as Shivers, The Last House On The Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre offered damning commentaries on everything including society, class and the nature of the all-American family itself.
However, they were all tourists compared to George A. Romero who seemed to have a special talent putting the boot into all the things a so-called civilised society tends to hold dear. The director sealed his credentials after famously casting a nihilistic eye over the social divide in the peerless Night Of The Living Dead at the tail end of the 60s and taking a zombified bite out of consumerism with Dawn Of The Dead about a decade later. But nestled between the two was arguably Romero’s most incendiary project of all, a take no prisoners thriller that pours kerosene all over the notion of government protection and blows it all to hell…
After a seemingly normal man suddenly murders his wife and burns his farmhouse to the ground with his kids inside, the citizens of Evans City, Pennsylvania find themselves in an unimaginable nightmare.
It seems that a plane carrying a bio-weapon crashed near the town a few days earlier, sending a deadly, insanity causing virus known as “Trixie” into the local water supply and before you know it, the military have decended upon the place in order to try and install martial law. However, mistakes are made right from the start as the operation to quarantine Evans City hits snag after snag after the rushed mission suffers from being understaffed, hastily planned and incredibly heavy handed. As a lack of communication, public distrust and maddening bureaucracy creates a perfect storm of chaos we follow a string of people on both sides of the quarantine line.
Firefighters and Vietnam veterans David and Clank immediately snap into survival mode as the former desperately avoids the patrols of bio-suited soldiers in order to save his pregnant girlfriend Judy. However, as the situation gets ever more violent, he’s joined by Kathy and her overprotective father Artie and the group try to break out of the area before the succumb to either the trigger happy troops or Trixie itself.
Meanwhile, as the body count rises, Colonel Peckem tries to get a lid on the situation while precariously staying within his parameters and the short fused Dr. Watts, who was drafted here to fight the virus without any suitable facilities being set up ready for him. Things will undoubtedly get far worse before things get better – if they even get better at all…
Essentially a hard-edged prototype to Dawn Of The Dead’s gaudy, iconic satire, The Crazies is an unrelenting thriller that sadonically blows holes through the notion that the people in charge of our safety are actually interested in our safety when the chips are really down. For a start, the nefarious Trixie virus is something that’s been created by our own government and due to the nature of national security, the bug was in the water supply for days before anything serious was put into action. Romero’s distrust of authority is palpable here as the near endless comedy of errors that occur due to mismanagement, restrictive protocol and outright sloppiness would be darkly hilarious if the notion behind it wasn’t so fucking terrifying.
Romero loads the movie with triggering images of families being herded from their homes by faceless troops and being burned alive by flame throwers, invoking both imagery from the Second World War and Vietnam – hell, there’s even a scene where a priest immolates himself in crazed protest – but rather than making the American military machine the sole antagonist, he also blurs the lines by making the actions of David, Clank and their group incredibly risky to the safety of the entite country. Our frightened “heroes” shoot down soldiers and helicopters who not only are “following orders” and trying to maintain a quarantine, but who don’t even know the full facts themselves. As the survivors fall before the effects of Trixie, it becomes painfully evident that there are no real heroes here.
Counting against the movie is the fact that Romero’s vision and scope can’t really be adequately carried by primitive production values that charitably could be described as rough as Jason Statham’s five o’clock shadow and some of the more hysterical, or wooden performances sometimes counteracts the tone that Romero is trying to create. Similarly, a bunch of Pennsylvania residents pretending to act “crazy” by waving their arms around aimlessly in a field is simply no match for the sight of a landscape of blue-faced zombies and often suffers by comparison.
However, Romero knows how to bring the nasty and coldly delivers one body blow after another that stubbonly lingers in the memory. Be it the sight of Artie, driven by Trixie’s terrible influence, taking his own daughter’s virginity by force, or Kathy’s bemused, almost disappointed “Oh..” after she catches a bullet. However, the cruelest blow is the movie’s denouement that not only sees Dr. Watts accidently killed thanks to the regulations he openly detests so much as he excitedly breaks protocol after cracking the cure, but also sees a despondent and brokenDavid not screened for inmuntinty when he may be the only member of Evans City who hasn’t succumbed to Trixie.
The final scenes of an exhausted and depressed Colonal Peckem being debriefed only to be immediately shipped off to the neighbouring, infected Louisville to start the cycle all over again is almost as quietly tragic and nihilistic as the matter of fact shooting of Ben at the end of Night Of The Living Dead and its these thought prokoving and haunting moments that allow The Crazies rise about its obvious limitations.
Brutally cruel, unavoidably political and unmistakably Romero, The Crazies does everything in its power to leave you with endless, anger inducing questions and no real answers as a lack of clear, definable good guys only enhances that horrible sinking feeling as the movie hurtles to its viciously unfair conclusion.
As our species marches ever closer to our own self obliteration, Romero warns that everyone is to blame, our rules won’t save us and that to think otherwise is only… well… crazy.
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