Going Mad, So Very Mad

As a horror fan, it's taken me some time to come to the realization that George Romero was hit or miss with his films. Many of us horror geeks will, of course, hold up Romero's original trilogy of zombie films -- Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead -- but many of his later zombie works were nowhere near as good as his early productions. Sometimes you get a good cult film, like Martin, but other times you end up with a tragic misfire of epic proportions, like Knightriders. Romero's 1973 film, The Crazies, feels like it falls into the latter camp.

In broad strokes the film feels like Romero exploring the concepts in his zombie apocalypse films just without the actual zombies to go along with. Instead of the undead rising from the grave, the film deals with an outbreak of a man-made virus that, naturally, starts driving everyone in a small town crazy. And yet, at the same time, there's just something off with the film. It's pitched too high, lacking a good hook to balance out the over-the-top performances and general formlessness of the film. It's all the concepts of an outbreak film without the meatiness to sink your teeth into (to continue the zombie allusions).

In the film were introduced to David (Will McMillan) and his fiancee Judy (Lane Carroll). David works as a volunteer firefighter in the town of Evans City, PA, while Judy is a nurse. They both get called into work one night after a man kills his whole family and lights their house on fire. Soon after all this happens the military shows up; lead by Colonel Peckem (Lloyd Hollar), the unit immediately shuts down the town and cordons off the whole town from the outside world. There's a virus in town driving everyone crazy and it has to be contained, whatever the cost.

While this might be the best thing for the country, the people of the town, David and Judy included, aren't on board with this plan. As the Army goes around, rounding people up and putting them at the high school for "containment", David, Judy, and a few friends hit the countryside, looking for a way to escape the town and get free. But as they travel, one by one they start going mad, and this is all set against a back drop of the townspeople fighting the military in one bloody conflict after another. The virus is driving everyone crazy and, if they aren't careful, there won't be a town left to save when all is said and done.

So let's be clear: in concept this movie is interesting. Of course, I'm viewing it in a post-COVID era when all disease films seem much more interesting, especially those that show humanity being really shitty as a virus rages around them. I think we've all seen plenty of that here in the real world, and while in the past we might have seen a film like The Crazies and said, "that would never happen," I think we have to admit, yes, this could happen. People really would be shitty, grab their guns, and resist any attempt to keep a virus contained. George Romero, ever the political filmmaker, apparently got that dead right.

That said, the concept of the film is about the only part of it that actually works. The film, in all other respects, it a chore to watch; it's slow, it's not that well directed (sorry, George), and it's pitched to such an extreme in tone and performance that it doesn't feel at all realistic. A version of this film that treated the subject matter with a more even and steady hand could actually make something really good out of The Crazies (and there's a remake that we will look at soon that might just have that steadier hand). The way this 1973 version was made, though, simply doesn't work.

For starters, none of the actors seem to know how to, well, act. Most of them are either dead and toneless, or they shout all their lines at a high pitch. I get that the characters were meant to be "on edge" and pushed to an extreme by the outbreak, but no one here seems to understand how to act like a normal human being, how to say their lines without shouting for the cheap seats. It throws off the tone and pitch of the whole film and keeps anyone from acting like a grounded, normal person. It's hard to care who might be an infected crazy person and who might be a survivor when they all act the same.

Perhaps that was what Romero wanted, to say that we're all crazy idiots. If that was the case, it's an ideal that is lost in the bad performances and over acting. We need someone to latch onto, someone to care about and none of the actors give us that. It's all fever-pitched monotony without a break to actually let us know and care about these people. I hated everyone in the film, especially as they constantly shouted everything at me, and I just wanted them all to die, whether they were a good person or a bad guy.

Although, let's be clear: the film never takes a stand as to who is "good" or "bad" or what. Should we be rooting for David as he tries to escape the quarantine, even as he knowingly drags infected people along with him? Are the military folk the good guys? They're trying to contain the disease, yes, but they also very quickly resort to martial law and then shooting everyone that even slightly steps out of line. Again, I think Romero wanted to say that there were no heroes in a situation like this, but that's a hard point to sell in a film like that, a horror movie with a clear hero arc (but without a hero to fill the role). It's a mess of a story, start to finish, and just hard to watch.

This film was a failure when it came out but has grown to be a cult classic over the years. I can't say I totally understand that stance; while I get the messages I think Romero was trying for, the film makes an utter mess trying to convey its themes. It needed to settle down, to tell a cohesive story with some kind of through-line we could cheer for. That's the thing about a zombie film: even as the film alludes to the fact that zombies are us and we're the zombies, it's still a man vs. monster film and we can cheer for the humans (some of them, anyway). When it's all just shitty humans being shitty it's much harder to care.

The Crazies has it's fans but I'm just not one of them. I'd rather go and watch the 2010 remake instead. That one, at least, has a better through-line in its storytelling...