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Cynicism about the military industrial complex wasn’t exactly a fringe position in 1973, but George A. Romero’s The Crazies is scathing nonetheless. When a military plane carrying a secret bioweapon crashes near the sleepy town of Evans City, Pennsylvania, the unsuspecting locals watch in terror as their formerly friendly neighbors turn into homicidal maniacs. Amid the mayhem, a pair of firemen (and, significantly, Vietnam War veterans) named David and Clank lead a small band of survivors attempting to escape both the growing number of infected townspeople and the military’s doomed, scorched-earth attempts to control the contagion. But, this being a Romero film, their prospects don’t look so hot. Though these ordinary lives are destroyed by a fictional biological weapon, the specter of real-life Vietnam-era coverups and environmental abuses—specifically the indiscriminate exposure of US servicemen and countless Southeast Asian civilians to the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange—hangs heavy over the film. - Text Courtesy of MOMA
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