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Directed By: George A. Romero
Starring:
Lane Carroll as Judy
Will MacMillan as David
Harold Wayne Jones as Clank
My Grade: F
When The Crazies ended, I tried to sum up my thoughts about it in one word. I came up with "awful." Then, I thought for a second...just a few days ago, my laptop, my bedroom ceiling fan, and my oven all broke within a matter of hours. I had thought that was "awful" too and, surely, all three of those things, even when combined, do not deserve to be lumped into the same category as George A. Romero's The Crazies. Thus, I turned to my trusty thesaurus to come up with a new word. I found many, all of them applicable. Here they are in convenient alphabetical order: abominable, appalling, deplorable, dire, disgusting, dreadful, ghastly, horrendous, horrible, offensive, repulsive, stinking, ugly, unpleasant, and unsightly. Take your pick. You see, The Crazies is not merely a bad movie...it is a movie so vile and reprehensible (Aha, two more words!) that I cannot honestly understand how it ever warranted a remake, much less its confounding 6.1 rating on the IMDb. It begins with a seemingly harmless scene of two young children, a boy and his younger sister, playing in a darkened house. They are interrupted by the sight of their father trashing a room down the hall and the smell of kerosene from the floor. The girl goes to find her mother and finds her, bloody and very much dead, in her bed. Then, the father burns the house down with the children inside. Are you having fun yet? If so...trust me, you won't be for very long.
Later, we are told that both of the children survived, but were horribly burned. If you think this is a happy ending for those two pitiful children, think again. Spoiler Alert: the girl is dead before we see her again, and, with all hell breaking loose in town, the boy's chances of survival are about as good as his already-dead sister's. This sets the stage for the rest of the movie...yes, two children finding their murdered mother's corpse, being badly burned by their crazed father, and then dying later from their wounds is only the beginning. Now, I must admit, I was ready to turn the movie off at about the thirty minute mark, when I realized that it surely wasn't going to get any better and was probably bound to get even worse. Alas, I stuck it out so that I could accurately write this review. That was wholly unnecessary; The Crazies is a one-note movie. There is no narrative, just a plot summary that spins its wheels. We learn the entire plot line via dull-as-dirt dialog in the first act (which, ironically, is completely indistinguishable from the second or third), leaving no room for future intrigue or suspense. As it goes, a virus has been accidentally unleashed upon a small town and the government has quarantined the area. The virus drives people insane, causing them to act in ways that are generally frowned upon. We are forced to follow two slightly intertwined plots, the first consisting of a young couple trying to escape and the second of the military basically scratching their heads and saying, "Doh, what do we do? What do we do?" If there is one cardinal sin in the horror genre, it certainly has to be making a boring movie. The Crazies is so mind-numbingly boring, so utterly bereft of entertainment, you might as well just stare at a blank TV screen.
I love the horror genre, and I completely understand that the point of some horror movies is to be disturbing and shocking. That was clearly George A. Romero's intention in making this movie. So, the scenes in the beginning with the poor children and later scenes, including one where a little boy finds his dead mother in the front yard, are not offensive merely by nature. They are offensive, because they are included for no other reason than to be shocking. They are shamelessly manipulative and, even worse, they don't elicit the disturbance they are meant to. The rest of the movie is so shoddily-constructed that these scenes are more irritating than they are emotionally-moving. It becomes very annoying when Romero insists on putting scenes of this ilk out there every so often, no doubt to trick the audience into thinking that something...anything is happening. By the time a father and his daughter, both under the influence of the virus, begin to have sex, I wanted to stab screwdrivers into my eyeballs. Of course, Romero has an underlying social message that all of this "shocking" stuff is supposed to reinforce. However, the message here is so blatant and so obvious, that it really negates the entire point. The message should spring from the film, not the film from the message. While watching The Crazies, we feel as though we are reading a pamphlet on the evils of the military and blah, blah, blah. The message and the movie are never cohesive and so neither feels at all convincing.
If it sounds like I'm being hard on The Crazies, it's because I am. Romero can make a better horror movie with $25, a video recorder, and a stick of spearmint gum than most directors can make with $30 million and a cast of Oscar winners. He has proven himself to be a master of low-budgets and, therefore, we have rightfully come to expect better from him than he brought with The Crazies. Here is a movie that, if viewed with no idea of who made it, would lead audiences to think it was some third-rate hack who now probably directs episodes of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. There is no sense of artistry, no sense of thought, and no sense of cohesion. Alas, all of George A. Romero's mistakes, both as director and screenwriter (because, let's face it, this screenplay is about as rotten as they come), might have been rectified had the cast actually been, you know, talented. Instead, it seems as if they intentionally cast the worst actors from some low-rent drama school. Half of the performances are distinctly laughable; the other half are excruciatingly lifeless. There's a problem when there are times when you cannot differentiate between the living actors and the red paint splattered dummies meant to look like corpses. Everything about The Crazies is an absolute mess. It's dumb, ugly, poorly-made, and plainly offensive. Let's just watch Dawn of the Dead and pretend like this never happened.
I love the horror genre, and I completely understand that the point of some horror movies is to be disturbing and shocking. That was clearly George A. Romero's intention in making this movie. So, the scenes in the beginning with the poor children and later scenes, including one where a little boy finds his dead mother in the front yard, are not offensive merely by nature. They are offensive, because they are included for no other reason than to be shocking. They are shamelessly manipulative and, even worse, they don't elicit the disturbance they are meant to. The rest of the movie is so shoddily-constructed that these scenes are more irritating than they are emotionally-moving. It becomes very annoying when Romero insists on putting scenes of this ilk out there every so often, no doubt to trick the audience into thinking that something...anything is happening. By the time a father and his daughter, both under the influence of the virus, begin to have sex, I wanted to stab screwdrivers into my eyeballs. Of course, Romero has an underlying social message that all of this "shocking" stuff is supposed to reinforce. However, the message here is so blatant and so obvious, that it really negates the entire point. The message should spring from the film, not the film from the message. While watching The Crazies, we feel as though we are reading a pamphlet on the evils of the military and blah, blah, blah. The message and the movie are never cohesive and so neither feels at all convincing.
If it sounds like I'm being hard on The Crazies, it's because I am. Romero can make a better horror movie with $25, a video recorder, and a stick of spearmint gum than most directors can make with $30 million and a cast of Oscar winners. He has proven himself to be a master of low-budgets and, therefore, we have rightfully come to expect better from him than he brought with The Crazies. Here is a movie that, if viewed with no idea of who made it, would lead audiences to think it was some third-rate hack who now probably directs episodes of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. There is no sense of artistry, no sense of thought, and no sense of cohesion. Alas, all of George A. Romero's mistakes, both as director and screenwriter (because, let's face it, this screenplay is about as rotten as they come), might have been rectified had the cast actually been, you know, talented. Instead, it seems as if they intentionally cast the worst actors from some low-rent drama school. Half of the performances are distinctly laughable; the other half are excruciatingly lifeless. There's a problem when there are times when you cannot differentiate between the living actors and the red paint splattered dummies meant to look like corpses. Everything about The Crazies is an absolute mess. It's dumb, ugly, poorly-made, and plainly offensive. Let's just watch Dawn of the Dead and pretend like this never happened.
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