The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973)

George A. Romero's fourth feature film (following Night of the Living Dead and the underrated There's Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch), The Crazies is in many ways a companion piece to his debut, replacing zombies with something more frighteningly plausible. If the grim, relentless Crazies is not quite as fun as Romero's other work (though there are a few darkly humorous moments), it's just as viscerally intense and visually impressive.

The Crazies opens with a wallop. A brother and sister are half-playing/half-fighting, with the brother teasing his younger sibling with a mask. Behind them, their father goes berserk, smashing up the home, dousing it with kerosene, and setting it alight while their mother lies dead in bed. Bam! The opening credits kick in. That's how you start a damn movie.

Soon, the military, in gas masks and protective gear, has set up shop in the local doctor's office. A virus is spreading in the small Pennsylvania town of Evans City. This highly contagious virus affects most of its carriers in two distinct ways. Some people get it and quickly die. Others survive but go irreversibly insane. A lucky few seem to have a natural immunity. The military plans to block off all entrances to Evans City and quarantine the townspeople in the high school. The blowhard mayor, a macho cop, and several gun-toting yokels don't like this idea but are clearly outmatched, despite the somewhat botched and understaffed initial efforts by the military.

When Col. Peckem (Lloyd Hollar) and reinforcements finally arrive, the news is worse than anticipated. The "virus" is actually a biological weapon, and its effects are being felt in the small town because a military plane carrying the weapon crashed nearby, contaminating the water supply. The president has authorized the military to nuke the town as a last resort if the spread can't be contained.

In the initial hullabaloo, Dr. Brookmyre (Will Disney) surreptitiously arranges for the escape of his nurse, Judy (Lane Carroll). Judy is pregnant, and the doctor instructs her to find her fiancé, David (Will McMillan), and hide out in the country until this whole thing blows over. (The townspeople are not given the biological weapon information.) David is a firefighter busy putting out the kerosene blaze ignited in the opening scene.

When Judy finally meets up with David and his fellow firefighter Clank (Harold Wayne Jones), they are scooped up by gas-masked military and put in an army van inhabited by a crazed older man, a widower named Artie (Day of the Dead's Richard Liberty), and Artie's daughter Kathy (Lynn Lowry, star of multiple cult movies, including Cronenberg's Shivers and Schrader's Cat People). Artie and Kathy seem a little loopy, but their behavior is not yet too alarming.

David and Clank are Vietnam vets who haven't been back home too long. Their Vietnam experience has instilled in them a healthy distrust of the military and its motives, so they use their training to take control of the van, overpower their captors, and escape. The crazy old man stays put, content to rant and rave on the street, but the five others go on the run, trying to get the eff out of Evans City and avoid the military and the virus while doing it.

This is the setup for everything that follows, as we bounce back and forth between the military's efforts to contain the biological weapon's spread, a desperate search to find a cure from a scientist who was on the team that created the weapon (Dawn of the Dead's Richard France), and the escapees' attempts to get out of town.

Romero is not a subtle filmmaker (with the partial exception of Martin), preferring the sledgehammer approach to make his sociopolitical observations, but it never comes across as heavy-handed or preachy and it almost always works because his dialogue sticks to practicalities rather than speechifying (when his characters do make speeches, it's because they're the kind of people prone to blowhardism, not because exposition needs to occur), he avoids sentimentality like the plague (no pun intended), and he's such a powerful yet unflashy visual stylist. It's the visceral, punchy, artful unsubtlety of pop art, comic books, rock and roll, protest signs, and fireworks exploding, not the unsubtlety of the lecturer or the showoff.

As I said earlier, The Crazies is a little less fun than Romero's other films because he dials his sense of humor way down here (notable exceptions including the killer knitting grandmother and the crazed woman calmly sweeping the grass during a gunfight between rednecks and the military), but the intensity and style and the strength of the performances kept me interested. Romero, especially in his earlier films, tended to cast experienced theater actors with minimal film credits who knew how to deliver committed performances without carrying the overfamiliar baggage of the famous movie star. His actors look like people, not superstars.

Unfortunately, The Crazies struggled at the box office, with indifferent audiences and an inexperienced distributor who worked hard to get the film in theaters (sometimes under multiple titles, including Code Name: Trixie) but couldn't make it a hit. Romero, despite the high quality of his feature film work, couldn't catch a break until the major success of 1979's Dawn of the Dead. Night of the Living Dead was a big hit, but a major screwup by the distributor, who forgot to put the copyright information on the title card after changing the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, ensured that the film immediately went into the public domain after the first public screening. A lot of people made money off the movie, but not Romero and his cast and crew. Romero's subsequent pre-Dawn '70s films failed to reach a large audience until the home video '80s and '90s turned them into cult classics (so much so that The Crazies even got a remake in 2010), and he paid the bills with director-for-hire jobs on commercials, PSAs, and the ABC sports documentary series The Winners (subjects included Reggie Jackson, O.J. Simpson, and Bruno Sammartino).

Money talk is for business jerks, though, and what I care about is what's on screen. George Romero made so many good and great movies, and he's sorely missed. The Crazies' dark vibes may not be the best choice for a pizza party, but it's a damn good movie. Give it a whirl if you've never seen it, especially if you're a Romero fan (and if you're not a Romero fan, get bent, sucker).