The Littlest Anti-Zombie
This is the weekend where a completely computer-generated movie about mutant turtles took the number one spot, replace a movie about the Spartans which might as well have been computer generated. Me, I watched THE CRAZIES. Yes, George A. Romero’s 1973 thriller about a biological weapon accidentally deployed in a small town, featuring no stars, no zombies, and no special effects. Unlike its high-powered theatrical competition, there was no eye-candy.
This was an interesting period for Romero. A local commercial director in Pittsburgh, he had had a surprise hit in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. Shot in black and white, the godfather of American zombie movies boasted a strange, gritty realism. The dead had started to walk the Earth, hungering for the flesh of the living. And while this hasn’t happened in real life, it feels like it would happen in precisely that way. No one would know why, the media couldn’t help us, and the dead would be slow and numerous.
Romero kept his grubby paws off the dead until 1978’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, but in the meantime he made a romantic comedy and three anti-genre movies. One of those, MARTIN, is useful here. The lead character thinks he is a vampire, but he’s just a guy who like to drink blood. He carries around a kit with razorblades, tubes, syringes and anesthetic. He’s not immortal at all.
THE CRAZIES is the same thing. It kind of looks like a Zombie movie. In fact, it kind of looks like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with the same bucolic farm houses, the same shambling crowds, the same militias. The difference here is, again, no supernatural element. The town, we learn in dribs and drabs over the course of the films first third, is infected with a biological warfare agent, the result of a military plane crash. People who get the bug either die, or go completely insane. And it’s spreading.
The story then concerns the efforts of an undermanned military force to quarantine the town under martial law, while fighting the deeply embedded bureaucracy which blocks their efforts; and also it follows a couple of volunteer firefighters who realize something is up and decide to try to escape the town before it happens to them. In a way, this is realism. There are no particular heroes and villains in THE CRAZIES, just people with opposing goals whose biggest challenge is the infrastructure they serve.
I don’t want to give anything away (apparently there is a a remake planned for next year) but it ends bleakly. It owes more to Greek tragedy than Joseph Campbell. I’ll put it this way - at the end of DAWN OF THE DEAD a lead character considers suicide, then changes his mind and turns the gun from his own head to shoot down the zombies surrounding him, thus effecting his escape. That sensibility is absent here.
Probably that bleakness, coupled with the mind-bendingly awful title, kept THE CRAZIES off most people’s radar. But I found it bracing, an antidote to the eye-candy happy-ending nonsense I’ve been watching lately. A glass of pure tonic, after an evening of Bacardi and Colas. I recommend this movie, though you’ll probably have to wait another several years before TCM shows it again. Hell, I waited 20 years, so can you.