Synopsis
Why are the good people dying?
Citizens of a small town are infected by a biological weapon that causes its victims to become violently insane. As uninfected citizens struggle to survive, the military readies its own response.
1973 Directed by George A. Romero
Citizens of a small town are infected by a biological weapon that causes its victims to become violently insane. As uninfected citizens struggle to survive, the military readies its own response.
Code Name: Trixie, Crazies, Los Crazies, Contaminación demencial. The crazies, Smag af døden, Καραντίνα: Ο Ουρανός Έβρεξε Θάνατο, La Nuit des fous vivants, הטירוף, Az őrültek, La città verrà distrutta all'alba, ザ・クレイジーズ/細菌兵器の恐怖, 분노의 대결투, Szaleńcy, O Exército do Extermínio, Безумцы, Salgın, 杀出狂人镇
War and historical adventure Horror, the undead and monster classics Monsters, aliens, sci-fi and the apocalypse Survival horror and zombie carnage Dangerous technology and the apocalypse Military combat and heroic soldiers Politics, propaganda, and political documentaries Sci-fi horror, creatures, and aliens Show All…
I like the remake of this... it’s a super solid glossy Hollywood movie that drifts more toward zombie stuff—which is cool! But it feels like a shiny Great Value version of this grassroots bureaucratic/military incompetence biological disaster Romero jam that’s loaded with subtext and real people who actually feel like real people and not Timothy Olyphant who feels like an actor.
Sorry to burst bubbles but I prefer this to said (solid) remake... mainly because DIY gritty filmmaking means a lot to me and it will always resonate with me 100% more... I mean this thing almost feels like a documentary in the same vein as NOTLD and Texas Chain Saw Masacre do, plus I always love taking in Romero’s frantic editing—it fits this perfectly.
Rotten Tomatoes: 67%
Metacritic Metascore: 63
IMDB: 6.1
66/100
Release Date: 16 March 1973
Distributor: Pittsburgh Films
Budget: $275K
#7 - Coronavirus 108
Amazon Ranked
Army soldier: "Round up everybody and take them to the Evans City High School. Everything was going OK at first. People were willingly coming in with us. The US Army has medical facilities at the school. They're treating them at the school. But the ones with the virus... man, it's like they're crazy!"
SYNOPSIS: The military attempts to contain a manmade combat virus that causes death and permanent insanity in those infected, as it overtakes a small Pennsylvania town.
Like Romero's "Day of the Dead," this is another marathon of carnage and excess talk, filled with…
Western PA GOD George Romero's nastiest and funniest film features a small town put under an incompetently run military quarantine after a biological weapon taints their water supply. A supremely bleak satire of the depleted and demoralized late-Vietnam era military, where it's never really clear what is being caused by the contagion which drives people insane and what's due to the overall panic, hysteria and the baseline violence people are capable of when put under pressure. So much high quality ownage in this one, as dumb-ass slob troops and yinzer townsfolk kill each other in very high numbers. An absolute blast that has absolutely ZERO contemporary relevance.
Released only a few years before he made his two greatest films, 'Martin' and 'Dawn of the Dead,' 'The Crazies' is an odd entry in the George A. Romero canon. The film concerns a small Pennsylvania town where a plane carrying a top secret biological weapon has crash landed in the nearby mountain range. The chemical seeps into the water supply causing infected citizens to go mad, murder each other, destroy their homes, and rampage through the streets. The military is sent in with little information as they try and fail to contain the situation. A few locals escape the government’s jurisdiction and do their best to maintain their freedom before one-by-one succumbing to the all-around toxic atmosphere.
Often shrugged…
This is how you do fast-editing: overwhelming but lucid, a montage of faces locked in horror, rage, fear, bewilderment. Romero's rough but composed style ducks the potential Body Snatchers paranoia of seeing who is infected as opposed to those who simply erupt against government forces in favor of overwhelming but carefully ordered brute strength. Well, ordered on Romero's part, as one of the most fun aspects of THE CRAZIES is how over their heads and sloppy the government is even as they descend upon a time with shocking speed. It's a giant clusterfuck of a scene, all the more compelling for being so.
There are no zombies in George Romero's The Crazies but don't let that deter you from checking it out, because this still gets plenty intense. You know, this movie would have probably hit me very differently pre-COVID times, but watching this now, I can't help but notice certain similarities in the way these outbreaks are handled. Eerie stuff!
Another great watch with Michelle.
I made a tweet half-jokingly about a week ago where I stated that there would be no real need for movies about the current pandemic because the filmography of George A. Romero exists. This isn’t to say that I don’t think there could be good movies about COVID-19, but that I believe tackling the subject will prove to be un-cinematic, because the times that we are currently living in have proven to be extremely difficult to comment upon without art being swallowed up into the black void that is the unfathomable stupidity of the current political landscape of the United States. During this current presidency I’ve frequently looked towards movies from the 1970s to channel my anger, frustrations and extreme…
Hooptober V: The Fifth One
21/32: 6 directors- Romero
“He was laughing like a hyena, then all of a sudden, like as if he had realized what he had done, he started to cry like a baby”
Romero’s under-appreciated cult masterpiece.
This movie is rough, both in subject matter and quality. Personally, I love the more grassroots and lower-budgeted vibe this movie has compared to his Dead trilogy.
This has one of the coldest opens ever. Two little kids are preparing for bed when their father goes apeshit and starts destroying the place. The mother’s found dead and then he sets the house on fire with the kids still in it. Then Boom! Title card. It’s a effective and startling…
Still a fabulous movie. The Crazies did lose a little bit of it potency in the 18 months since my first viewing at the height of the COVID pandemic, but it remains one of George A. Romero's strongest cinematic efforts, and an absolute blast to watch.
So much fun revisiting this with Michelle.
Some interesting ideas that fail to deliver.
It plays on similar themes as Night Of The Living Dead & Dawn Of The Dead. The problem is it takes a more bureaucratic approach focusing more on the scientific and the political which left me not really caring.
The idea of a virus spreading making people Homicidally and hysterically insane is interesting because of the way it then makes uninfected people act paradoxically crazy. Even the extreme actions of the army become somewhat crazy.
The film is completely spoiled by woeful dialogue and beyond amateurish sound quality. It makes you significantly doubt the qualities of Romero as a director. In hindsight it may be true to say that his first film was an accidental masterpiece and he has ridden that wave ever since.