I’ve spent most of the last three days watching movies, which is pretty much a go-to when I’m too sick to leave the house. There have been some very good films in there, and they have sent my brain careening off in all sorts of directions, moreso than I think I want to cover in one post. It’s a distinct feeling to have a restless mind and a drained body, there’s a lot I want to express but not enough energy to focus myself long enough to do it.
There was a movie in there though that, while not strictly good, was still kind of awesome, and that was George Romero’s original 1973 version of The Crazies. It’s a horror-thriller that was slickly and expensively re-made last year about a man-made biological toxin that accidentally seeps into the water supply of a small town, causing residents to go varying degrees of mad – from goofy to perverted to downright homicidal. The Army (mostly represented by gun-toting mobs in white hazard suits and gas masks) descends on the town and tries to contain the outbreak by blockading the place and rounding everyone up, but the nature of the illness as well as plain human nature just ratchets up the chaos hour by hour.
There aren’t really any heroes in the movie – there’s a lunky-faced fireman/former Green Beret who’s trying to get his girlfriend to safety, but we know that could actually spread the infection if he gets out of town so we’re not exactly rooting for them. Really, it’s not about good guys or bad guys but about a situation of absolute madness that we can’t seem to help but make worse.
Like I said – it’s not a great piece of film; Romero’s struggling against his budget and a pretty hysterical bunch of local over-actors, and being that it doesn’t have any of his trademark zombies in it most fans of his will probably be let down anyway. But I think I’m starting to break through to the point where I put magnified value on filmmakers outside the mainstream who find different ways of doing things, even in the context of sub-par films.
Those scenes of the gas-masked soldiers breaking into people’s houses will stick with me – whatever orders they shout are muffled into a drone by their masks, and often the people they find are jabbering nonsense in return. The Army – to keep the story from leaking – requires all people communicating on their network to wait for a voice authentication; which means that even the most urgent messages get bogged down by insistent bureaucracy. In our world situations break down over the simplest, dumbest unintended consequences; and most big-budget movies don’t have the spine to tell us something that unsettling.
And it has fun with the nature of “madness” as a crowd-sourced disease. A farmer who answers a soldier’s orders with a rifle blast might be just defending his property, while a Grandma who smiles kindly while stabbing someone with a knitting needle is definitely infected. But where’s the line in-between?
There are images and moments of crazy creativity in this movie, even though I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. It gives me faith that playing by the structure isn’t always the way to go – sometimes it just leads you to make a movie that doesn’t surprise anyone. And I like a movie that can still surprise me after all these years; and sometimes that requires someone who just didn’t even bother with the structure.