The Crazies
1973, USA, Directed by George A. Romero
Colour, Running Time: 98 minutes
DVD, Region 2, Anchor Bay, Video: Anamorphic 1.66:1, Audio: DTS
A small town in Pennsylvania: people are inexplicably beginning to act abnormally to the point of becoming homicidal and before long the army themselves are brought in to seal off the area, indicating that the problem is worse than it first might appear. The problem is worse alright, because they caused it. Trying to sort out a ‘typical army f**k-up’ (in the classic words of James Karen in Return of the Living Dead!) the military become increasingly heavy-handed with the essentially innocent victims of what turns out to be an experimental government biological weapon - a small group of survivors attempt to escape the escalating bloody mayhem.
Following worldwide success with Night of the Living Dead (though strangely missing any financial rewards for its makers) and a couple insipid movies (the rather boring Jack’s Wife and the elusive There’s Always Vanilla) Romero proceeded to direct this low budget horror/thriller with a frenetic pace, nicely capturing the climbing tension that the situation arouses in both civilians and the military operatives that are forced to try to clean up the mess. Innocent people gradually descend into madness as they succumb to the virus (that is probably in the water), usually killing each other or, at one point, engaging in incestuous activity. As the army begin firing first and asking later a level of sympathy for the civilians is successfully built up by Romero, while the oppressive ambience that evolves as the army exacerbate their attempts to contain the problem hits poignant heights. The action, whilst clearly struggling to develop beyond its budgetary limitations, is fairly effective and nicely edited. Some of the performances come across as pretty convincing - Romero has often seemed adept at invoking good character acting from his players. This film comes across almost as a nice stepping stone between the aforementioned 1968 film and Dawn of the Dead, which later came in 1978 - if you replaced the ‘crazy’ people with walking corpses, it could easily be part of Romero’s Dead series. By the way, you may notice Richard Liberty turning up, who later played one of my favourite characters in Day of the Dead!
Any apparent grain or lack of definition with background detail of the image might betray the fact that it was shot on 16mm (being blown up to 35mm originally for theatrical presentations), but it looks superb considering (Romero even claims that some of it looks better than when it was shot, thanks to some modern digital restoration techniques). Plus, the 1.66:1 intended viewing ratio is retained in this anamorphic image with pillar-boxing: well done!! I’m sick of seeing 1.66:1 films cropped to fit a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Anchor Bay, as usual, provide DTS and DD5.1 ’surround’ mixes that are somewhat artificial but may suit individual viewer preferences - sound otherwise suffers from its original technical limitations. Blue Underground released this stateside and, whilst I’ve not seen that disc, I suspect it will provide a marginally sharper picture due to the probability that the AB version is an NTSC to PAL transfer, however the BU does not provide the 5.1 options. A fairly extensive extras roster rounds out an excellent release of an enjoyable film.