Crazies, The
Entry updated 8 January 2017. Tagged: Film.
Film (1973; vt Code Name Trixie). Cambist Films. Directed by George Romero. Written by Romero, based on a story by Paul McCollough. Cast includes Lane Carroll, Harold Wayne Jones and W G McMillan. 104 minutes. Colour.
A plane carrying germ-warfare material crashes near a small US town and pollutes the drinking-water, causing an epidemic of homicidal and psychopathic behaviour in the inhabitants. The army moves in and the crazed brutality of the soldiers as they shoot victims of the virus (or trapped innocents) is as bad as the lunacy of their targets. There are strong similarities between this and Romero's best-known film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), in that both involve a small group of trapped "normal" people surrounded by nightmare. Romero's exploitation movies are more ambitious than most – wittier, too – and this, as usual, has, half-visible through the blood, a political/cultural subtext about an uncaring society. [JB/PN]
links
previous versions of this entry