utgard14 A plane carrying a biological weapon crashes near a small Pennsylvania town. The weapon is a virus that drives people insane. The military quickly moves in and sets up martial law, preventing anyone from leaving the town. A group of people, including a nurse and her unibrowed boyfriend, try to escape the town before they're infected. But to do so they'll have to evade the military and the crazies.George Romero's first really good movie after Night of the Living Dead is this engrossing low-budget thriller with some creepy moments and surprises. The actors are a mixture of semi-professionals and amateurs. I know Romero went for this approach to add some realism to the movie. Sometimes it works; sometimes it is pretty campy. A lot of these people can't act to save their lives. Most of the movie is people yelling at each other but there is quite a bit of action (of the uncoordinated variety). The '70s aesthetic and rural location shooting is a plus. Definitely worth a look. Also, 2010 remake wasn't half-bad.

deacon_blues-3 Poorly acted, poorly filmed, no production value, and very, very, very BORING! I've definitely had my fill of people running around in whites and gas masks for another millennium! Nothing actually happens in this film! It's all just a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around at a command post and talking about things happening elsewhere!Plot: A guy with "brains" and only one eyebrow is caught in an epidemic of insanity, which mainly causes a bunch of non-paid extras to lolly-gag around trying to decide whether they are drunk or just happy to be part of a movie. The film is a bunch of really bad actors following a really bad script while being filmed as cheaply as possible.Some relevant observations:Antibiotics are not prescribed to treat viruses!People do not always hit someone every time they fire a weapon!Cheap sets and fx are not a virtue!People have no peripheral vision while wearing a gas mask!While they had the chance, the producers of this film would have served humanity better by dropping a real nuclear bomb on Pittsburg, Pa.!This is one of the worst films I have ever watched from beginning to end.The only reason I watched it all was because I thought something interesting might actually happen before it ended; boy was I wrong!George Romero is not a genius, he's a one-hit-wonder!Even "Dawn" was better as a remake. Only "Night" was better in the original.This film is hard to find for a good reason—it stinks! If you haven't been able to watch it, be thankful for the wisdom and kindness of divine providence!

HorrorQueen17 This was one of the few Romero films I hadn't seen before, and after seeing it I have no idea why I waited so long!This very low budget movie about a town infected with a virus via its water supply has the classic Romero feel, in that the film focuses far more on the people affected than the situation at hand. The acting is not the best you'll ever see, but believable, and you do feel for the characters all the way until the end. The sense of desperation he manages to create is impressive and the film is completely engrossing from start to finish. While perhaps not quite at the height of his Dead trilogy, this is one Romero movie you can't miss.

secondtake 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.