THE CRAZIES

Cynicism about the military industrial complex wasn’t exactly a fringe position in 1973, but George A. Romero’s THE CRAZIES is scathing nonetheless. When a military plane carrying a secret bioweapon crashes near the sleepy town of Evans City, Pennsylvania, the unsuspecting locals watch in terror as their formerly friendly neighbors turn into homicidal maniacs. Amid the mayhem, a pair of firemen (and, significantly, Vietnam War veterans) named David and Clank lead a small band of survivors attempting to escape both the growing number of infected townspeople and the military’s doomed, scorched-earth attempts to control the contagion. But, this being a Romero film (auteur of the LIVING DEAD series), their prospects don’t look so hot. Though these ordinary lives are destroyed by a fictional biological weapon, the specter of real-life Vietnam-era coverups and environmental abuses — specifically the indiscriminate exposure of US servicemen and countless Southeast Asian civilians to the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange — hangs heavy over the film. Thankfully these sorts of concerns are all a thing of the past and we can enjoy this powderkeg filmmaking as a work of pure entertainment!