Very Cool!!!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Romero once again does a good job of telling a compelling story full of social commentary, all the while getting good performances out of his actors. The stand-outs for me were Lloyd Hollar and Richard France, both of whom give intense performances, as their characters are constantly at each others throats. Will MacMillan is fairly straight-lace as the hero, and Lane Caroll is sweet and likable as the love-interest (she also shows off her titties in the beginning) - the ending is where they get to shine, in a tear-jerking scene. My only gripe is the lack of 'crazies', where as in contrast, Romero's zombie movies are full of said menace. Still, the threat of the 'crazy-virus' looms over the entire story, enough to imbue a sense of urgency to everything. This movie is an interesting foot-note in the zombie dominated career of the legendary Mr. Romero, and should not be overlooked.

"We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore!" - Howard Beale ("Network")This is a review of George Romero's "The Crazies", a horror film released in 1973, and 2010's "The Crazies", a remake directed by Breck Eisner, son of media mogul Michael Eisner.The better of the two, Romero's film sees the US military accidentally releasing a biological weapon into a small town's water supply. This bio-agent turns the town's population into raving, murderous lunatics. As a result, the US government swiftly quarantines the town. Much violence ensues.Romero's film is shapeless, overlong, lacking in tension towards its final act and nowhere as good as his zombie movies. It's also frequently brilliant. It's a mad, hilariously anarchic, politically incorrect mob of a movie, filled with manic energy and many strange passages, some of which were deemed shocking back in the early 1970s. Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove" - Romero borrows Kubrick's all-percussion soundtrack – and Peter Watkins' "Punishment Park" seem to be the chief influences.Like Romero's zombie movies, "The Crazies" simmers with post-Watergate distrust. Our heroes are government hating Vietnam vets, and much of the film observes as various social institutions (the state, the nuclear family, the church) fester, implode or explode. Significantly, Romero paints contemporary society as being "crazy" long before the bio-agent was released; it was already waiting to discharge. The contaminated water merely shatters civilization's last facades and brings various latent abominations and/or unspoken feelings rushing to the surface. It was always going to happen. Or, as Romero says in interviews, "what's crazy is that it hasn't already occurred."Unsurprisingly, themes of incest and militarism abound. A father has sex with his daughter, priests set themselves on fire (echoing the famous self-immolation photographs of the Vietnam war, in which Buddhist monks set themselves alight), soldiers tear down villages like the Nazis' liquidated ghettos, helicopters echo Vietnam's Hueys, and much of the film paints military and government figureheads as being as mad and irrational as the infected townspeople. Pretty soon it becomes clear that the state's method of treating the madness is itself madness, Romero eradicating the line between infected and the uninfected; they're all crazy, the government mimicking the volatile, violent behavioural patterns of those contaminated. "You can't just push people around like this!" one man yells. But no one listens. Everyone's being pushed.The film's pacing is slowed by various sequences which focus on annoying bureaucrats and fast-talking figureheads. Though grating, Romero's intentions with these scenes are nevertheless correct. State bureaucracy, in which men and women spend as much time fighting each other, red tape and the inefficiency of procedure, is itself virus-like and counter-intuitive; nothing gets done, everyone infected with a kind of bureaucratic madness. Elsewhere scenes show rural idylls and totems of conservative America torn apart by mad patriarchs (the film's opening sequence is "Night of the Living Dead" in microcosm). Hilariously, few people are even given a chance to succumb to the virus; the military kills them more efficiently and rapidly than the virus ever could. One of the film's jokes is that a perfectly functioning military apparatus is far more illogical, bloated and morally messed up than the collapsed, lawless hordes it battles.Fittingly, the name of the film's bio-agent is Trixie, literally "the bringer of joy". On an allegorical level, it is the state's blunders, its inherent violence, which are directly inspiring an almost carnivalesque explosion of public mayhem. The military steps in to violently clamp down on these outbursts, but they're not fast enough. Oppositional groups clash, lock horns and slaughter one another in a mad, incoherent festival which does nothing but destroy any form of potential socio-political progress. An early 70s capitalist order is assaulted, but rather than enabling progressivism in the formation of a new social order, things are only further debilitated and any rational functions necessary for future formations are swiftly put down. The film ends with a pregnant woman dying (and with her the hope of a future), and two rugged men stepping out of the conflict's wreckage. One's an African American, airlifted above the carnage (symbolically outside and above it all), another's a fireman who embodies the adjusted (immunized) man of tomorrow: cynical and a Vietnam vet, but with a traditional love for marriage, servitude and stability (his first lines stress his love for "moderation"). The lyrics "Heaven Help Us" play over the film's closing credits. There are countless parallels between "The Crazies" and Romero's earlier and later films. Two obscure ones: Richard France, who looks like a cross between Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola, plays "men of reason" in both "The Crazies" and "Dawn of the Dead". His character's always warning populaces (Richard's an Orson Welles scholar, his character having many overlaps with Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio-play). Then there's "The Crazies'" plot itself, which echoes Romero's earlier "Season of the Witch", in which the banalities of the bourgeois drive an oppressed housewife's to various subversions and perversions. Released in 2010, Breck Eisner's "The Crazies" removes the politics of Romero's film but largely tells the same tale. It's a safe, clean and sanitised movie; like licking an Ipod while rubbing a credit card on your crotch. Glossy, overproduced, expensive looking and immaculately pressed, the film moves, looks and feels like plastic. While some of its horror moments elicit some thrills, it's mostly all very conventional and clichéd. Still, some of Eisner's changes are interesting. While Romero has officials talking of dropping a nuke on the infected town, Eisner does it for real (encapsulating the film's philosophy: spectacle over politics). Elsewhere he spares the life of a government soldier (who helps our band of rebels), whilst the far more pessimistic Romero outright murders the very same character. 7.5/10 - See 2009's "Carriers", 2011's "Contagion" and 1978's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Worth one viewing.

The Crazies (1973)A fairly creaky but still chilling movie, and a cult classic, with an original big-government bad-army premise that must have been frighteningly real at the time: a germ warfare mishap has infected a town and the army has moved in to quarantine the entire area. And kill or let die anyone not cooperating.The powerlessness of the individual against an army determined to be heartless (out of necessity) is a theme that worked then as well as now. But if there is some sympathy for the individual doctors and army personnel, since they are doing what needs to be done to prevent further outbreak, you can only feel growing anger that this kind of situation could actually happen. If bio-weapons exist, it seems eventually one will be released by mistake, and then what? Will it be like the Japanese nuke plant after a tsunami, where evacuations and appropriations are "required" in the name of national security. And is the solution to bio warfare the dropping of an atomic bomb? Maybe.That's at the core of this film. There is of course a couple at the center of the struggle to evade the authorities and survive. And infighting, questions of who to trust, how to figure out who is infected (going back to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," of course), and fear of infection itself pepper the film with drama and sometimes incredulity. There is also the hope of finding someone immune to the disease, which turns out to be slim, especially when the real cures get obscured by events.All of this would work better with better acting. Director George Romero got away with some raw and imperfect acting in his very original "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968, but that was partly because everyone was either panicked or behaving like a zombie (there were, for sure, a couple great leads in that one). Here, though, most people are ordinary folk, and between their clunky acting and the even more clunky filming (in raw color), it just smells too much of a throw-together affair. Too bad, because the premise is terrific. There are other movies that push this kind of idea, by the way, and push it better, the most famous probably being "The Andromeda Strain" from 1971. However, if this kind of rough-edged production doesn't bother you, I think you have a kind of low-brow high-brow classic, appealing to all kinds of sentiments.

While you could dismiss this as just another Romero zombie flick, let me tell you this: it isn't! Of course that doesn't mean, that you will like it or even that the Remake will make you want to watch this. And of course the stringent budget does affect the shooting. But I think they did not only do their best with the money, but Romero went all out with the "documentary" feel.The basic idea stays the same (as is shown in the Remake too) and has been done quite a few times. Some have said, that this movie was ahead of its time and maybe it was, but that is not the point. It's how you feel about the movie and the message (you might feel it's too preachy, too slow or lacking in other categories). Or you might think it's a classic (although I do think that word has been overused). But you will know after the first few minutes, because like it or not, it stays true to the style and visual it sets out to.