The Crazies
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: An army-developed virus escapes, somehow, into a small town in Pennsylvania.
SYMPTOMS: The virus makes people go insane. Pursuant to this, a town full of crazy people makes people go insane.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? The army is brought in to control the town and contain the virus. This is good for the rest of the world and bad for the townspeople. The good news is, the army is taking care of things. The bad news is, it’s the same utterly incompetant army that let the virus go in the first place.
WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS? As with many George Romero movies, nothing is settled, only abandoned. The plague begins mysteriously, there is a good deal of sound and fury, and the movie ends before we know what’s going to happen to the town. Or the rest of the world.
AND THE BEST DEATH GOES TO: Harold Wayne Jones, as “Clank,” gets the virus, or thinks he does anyway, and manages to take out a score of armed men in the woods before getting the movie’s most elaborate gore gag with a to-camera shot to the head.
NOTES: Romero’s typical problem is that the sophistication of his ideas and the ambitions of his goals is often all-but-undone by his cheerfully amateurish production values and community-theater level quality of his actors’ performances, never more acutely on display than here (Romero regular Richard French soars as a scientist who has apparently stayed up all night watching Orson Welles movies).
The concept is utterly brilliant; a virus makes people crazy, but as the movie goes on we absolutely cannot tell for sure who has the virus, who is responding sanely to a violent military takeover and who is using the situation as a license to act crazy (If I was writing a remake today, which I’m not, I would make it that it turns out there never was a virus, that the whole thing is a military operation to practice for a total martial takeover of the United States). The scenes of put-upon Army regulars bickering about supplies and bueraucracy and dyspeptic, bilious think-tank guys planning to drop an atomic bomb have a pungency today that they may or may not have had in 1973. I remember plenty of government-conspiracy movies from back then, but they always portrayed the government as a cold, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful machine, capable of anything. Here, the government is under-funded, under-staffed and completely incompetent, in over their heads and just as desperate as the people they’re trying to control. A movie ahead of its time.
The Big Reveal
The twist ending, the head-spinner, the fake-out, what M. Night Shamalayan calls “The Paradigm Shift.”
“And it turns out that, the whole time…”
The antagonist is really the protagonist’s other personality. The murderer was in the room from the very beginning. It was all the dream of a man who’s been cryogenically frozen for two hundred years. They were on Earth the whole time. The protagonist is really a ghost. It turns out it’s not the past after all. Everything is happening in the head of a dying man’s last moments.
What are your favorites? When do they work? When do they not? When do they satisfy, when do they frustrate? When are they the final piece of the puzzle and when do they come out of left field? When do they make you want to see the movie again and when do they make you say “What the hell did that have to do with anything?”
And, we’re all professionals here. Spoil away.