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my review of the lesser known Romero 70s horror flick, The Crazies:

“Society Run Amok”

Such a human document this film, it breathes and sweats. I suppose it still has taken a back seat to Romero’s zombie classics in the minds of most critics, but it has always been one of my favorites. The Crazies is pure folklore, ripped from the tabloids, but nowadays it seems a little too close to home. Conspiracy springs to life, dancing over the flames of society run amok. The talking heads and the muckety mucks are powerless to stop it. Now the germ, “code name ‘Tricksie’”, takes center stage. Here it is a plane crash carrying the bug instead of a lab leak. This hits most all the apocalyptic buttons, but with a slow drag 70s style delivery, overrun with military goons and civilian rabble. Bureaucratic snafus and clandestine research collide in a train wreck of madness and burning corpses. The brain dead dancing hippy wildness in the school where the army corrals all the diseased is a fitting bookend to the decadence of the 60s. As the insanity piles up into the sky, the scenes vary from amusing asylum antics, to mere street violence and finally utter perversion. I’m not really a fan of Romero’s occasional political spin, but here he mostly plays it deadpan. Either no one is to blame or we all are. Perhaps in the end we will figure out a cure, he seems to suggest as a possibility, but perhaps a long shot judging by the outro. I have seen the remake too which was mildly entertaining but too slick to really say much of anything worth remembering. I watched this original classic as part of my own personal ‘germ warfare’ festival, alongside Warning Sign and Endangered Species (the 80s flick starring Robert Urich not the more recent film), and of the 3 this is easily my top choice.