Retro Review: The Crazies (1973)

I figured I would review this one since the remake is coming out tomorrow. ¬†I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even heard of this film before I saw the trailer for the new one. ¬†I haven’t seen the new one yet but I can already tell they’ve made a film that’s quite a departure from this 1973 original. ¬†Directed by George Romero just five years after he released The Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Crazies was made for a little over $200,000 and with a mostly local cast in Pennsylvania. ¬†So as you can imagine, lot of the effects and stunts were done on the cheap. ¬†And it really sucks to admit, but I couldn’t help but be completely disinterested with this movie after the first ten minutes.

Ok, so here’s the plot: the film opens with a young sister and brother tormenting each other in their home. ¬†They then realize their dad (or at least some dude that’s in their home) is busting shit apart and setting the place on fire. ¬†He’s gone crazy! ¬†Immediately following that, the army shows up with a seemingly endless supply of Hazmat suits and gas masks. ¬†It appears that a plane carrying some sort of virus crashed near the area. ¬†The virus causes people to bust shit apart and set their houses on fire. ¬†Then there’s a doctor that has a potty mouth and helped to create the virus (I think). There’s also a Colonel who is reluctantly put in charge of doing what he can to save the city from being overrun with “crazies.” ¬†And finally there’s a group of survivors that run around in the woods and catch the virus (spoiler alert) and start raping and pillaging.

I’m not trying to be a dick about this but the movie is a bit of a mess. ¬†It feels like they couldn’t decide if the movie should be about the survivors (like The Dead series) or if it should take a point of view from the army trying to contain it/cure it. ¬†So instead of one central plot, you have two half baked subplots with an ensemble of disposable characters. ¬†And this sort of thing can work with exploitation films but if you just have a few people shooting each other for 100 minutes, it gets rather boring. ¬†Some of the violence is decent and was likely more captivating in the early 1970s. ¬†But nowadays, it’s just not engaging enough.

There are some parts I enjoyed though. ¬†My favorite was a small group of men that we cut to at least twice throughout the film. ¬†They are discussing contingency plans for the outbreak and in one scene, how they would spin the detonation of a nuclear bomb to clear out the infected along with a large number of military personnel. ¬†There’s nothing really original about these scenes (except for the one dude with an incredibly disproportionate head) but they’re just a lot of fun. ¬†Anytime you have a dude just wave off 1500 military folk as expendable, it’s a rather interesting. ¬†But yeah, that’s about it.

The DVD that I watched actually didn’t look all that bad. ¬†There was a reel early on that had a smudge on it but I was amazed at how vibrant the colors were and just how clear an independent film from that long ago looked. ¬†The audio however is a completely different story. ¬†Overall, it sounded incredibly tinny and full of noise. ¬†There is a moment early on where an individual is accidentally shot and I couldn’t even tell because the gunshot sound was muffled by all the dialog and commotion going on. ¬†This next part is going to force me to put on my home theater geek hat. ¬†So this film is present in 2 channel stereo. ¬†I happened to just matrix that into Dolby Surround so that the dialog would come through the center channel speaker. ¬†I would approximate that for about 40 minutes, I had a low frequency hum coming out of my rear left channel. ¬†It wasn’t too annoying and it was low. ¬†But it actually started to give me a headache after a while. ¬†I have no idea if this is fixed on the Blu-ray release from this week and I’ll be unable to find that out for you. ¬†I can’t believe this is longest paragraph of my review!

I wish I had more to say but I just couldn’t get into this movie at all. ¬†It’s all rather forgettable, none of the characters have any depth, and well, I just didn’t care about it. ¬†There is a bit of nudity towards the beginning if you’re into that sort of thing. ¬†But other than that and a few interesting pieces of violence, this movie gets a definite “move along” from me.

Retro Review is a weekly column written by Dustin and occasionally other authors from the Breach. Here we take a look at films from yesteryear. 1989 and older to be exact. At times we’ll try and analyze how the film has influenced modern cinema, discuss the quality of the current release, or just do a traditional review of the damn thing and throw it up here. As always, requests for these reviews are welcomed.

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