Directed by: George A. Romero
Starring: Lane Carroll, Will MacMillan, Harold Wayne Jones
You know, I don’t think there’s any movie maker that’s as big of an influence on horror movies than George A. Romero. I mean, Night of the Living Dead by itself basically opened the world’s eyes to how anybody can make a scary movie with a shoestring budget AS WELL as ushering in the golden age of zombie movies, but between all the sequels (mostly Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead) as well as Creepshow and this movie, The Crazies… that’s the foundation for about 50% of horror movies in the last forty years.
Anyway, The Crazies is a pretty standard “small town is quarantined by the government” movie… while I’m not exactly sure about the timeline on this, but I think it’s the first, or one of the first of that type of movie. A bacteriological weapon gets loose in the water supply of a small town which makes the people infected by it go… well, crazy. The government comes in and secures the area, but the “secured” people aren’t very happy about the whole idea. We follow a small group who escape the cleaner crews, as well as a scientist who’s trying to find a cure to the disease while inside the diseased zone. Exciting!
Unfortunately, being a trend-setter doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re the best in your eventual field. There are a lot better movies with this same idea than The Crazies (for instance, Outbreak). It’s slow-paced and very obviously tries to capture the same loner scared people feel of Night of the Living Dead. One surprising thing about this movie (for this sort of genre, that is) is that the government people involved in the quarantine are never really portrayed as evil, or even really villains. It’s an interestingly humanized feeling for a group that is generally shown in films to be heartless and uncaring of casualties. It was… refreshing.
Films in Boxes 
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