The Crazies (1973)

Dir: George A. Romero

A plane carrying a biological weapon crashes near a Pennsylvania town, releasing a highly contagious virus into the water supply. Next thing you know, the inhabitants have gone bonkers and are killing one another, setting fire to their houses and having sex with their kinfolk. Much like Romero's zombie films, the plot depicts a fight for survival against not only the crazies, but also the shoot-to-kill military goons out to control the epidemic by any means necessary. The script is characteristically paranoid and loaded with angry allegory but, unfortunately, it never quite engaged me and just felt a bit uninvolving and loosely structured. There's frenetic editing, a lot of brutal action and explosions, but it still drags. I'll give it a bonus point for having so much of Lynn Lowry in it, but otherwise this is fairly average by Romero standards. **