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.
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
Whoa whoa whoa. Have you not seen Knightriders? I can’t think of a community-theater troupe I have ever seen that displays more of a community-theater level quality than the cast lined up for Knightriders.
…but I still fucking love it.
I second that. The acting in Knightriders is almost beyond amateurish — but you can’t take your eyes off Ed Harris, can you?
You cannot. A tour de force performance by Mr. Harris, frankly.
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 Liberals
Just watched this again since it was on TCM Underground over the weekend. I haven’t seen it in many years, but it hasn’t lost any of its punch. What the military considers acceptable losses is quite chilling indeed. (A whole town of 3,600 wiped out? No problem. What about the troops sent there to keep order? The medical and scientific personnel trying to find a possible vaccine? Whatever it takes.) Horror films from the ’70s sure tended to err on the side of pessimism, didn’t they?