Movie Review: The Crazies (1973)

The Crazies is an extremely low budget horror film directed by George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead). While it’s not in black and white, it somehow looks even cheaper than Night of the Living Dead. The nearest comparison I can think of visually is Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, made a year earlier.

This isn’t to say it’s bad. Romero is well known for making the most of his budgetary restraints, something that he certainly does here. His movie has an ambitious plot that’s pretty big in scope. You can easily imagine it being a bigger budgeted movie, and if you’d rather see that version, there is a 2010 remake of this movie, that I thought was pretty good.

The movie follows two different sets of characters. There are the townspeople, encountering the outbreak, and the officials trying to handle it. I would actually like to see less of the officials dealing with it. I think the movie would be better with a little more mystery on that end.

Due to a crashed plane carrying a chemical weapon that infected the town’s water supply, people start going crazy or dying. Because of this, a bunch of military personnel arrive, with instructions to shoot anybody on sight. The surviving uninfected townspeople, led by two Vietnam veterans, go on the offensive, fighting off the military as well as the infected.

It’s a promising setup for a film, with plenty of opportunities for Romero’s signature social commentary. It’s essentially as if he took the ending to Night of the Living Dead, and said, “What if that shot was intentional?”

None of the characters, either military or townsfolk, are all too memorable. Because of this, I was disappointed that there wasn’t too much of the crazies onscreen. I would have felt differently if the characters were more interesting.

Rating: 5/10