AllMovie

All but unseen for years, George Romero's The Crazies essentially reworks his Night of the Living Dead as a more explicit allegory for the 1960s. To this end, he's less successful than before, but the film is still of considerable interest. Never quite as powerful as in its opening scene of domestic horror, it presents a nightmare miniaturization of the turbulent '60s, with government forces desperately fighting to battle the effects of a virus, of its own creation, that turns the populace into anarchic lunatics. The line between sanity and insanity gets stretched pretty thin as the film moves along. The mask-clad government forces look like monsters while their opponents look perfectly normal. While it doesn't live up to Romero's previous, or future work, all in all this is a pretty fascinating document of its time, with effectively staged scenes of action and horror combining effectively with the director's potent pessimism.