If you’d force me to limit my George A. Romero collection to three movies, my choices would be Night of the Living Dead (for evident reasons), Martin (where Romero manages to keep you guessing what’s true and what’s not) and The Crazies. In The Crazies (which occasionally is also named Code Name: Trixie) a small town has more than a bit of bad luck. The water supply gets infected by a biological warfare virus and it doesn’t take long before people start attacking each other. And that’s when the army is sent in.
I had to think of The Crazies as much as of Night when I was watching Diary of the Dead recently. Day of the Dead will probably the bleakest zombie movie (by Romero) up to Diary, but The Crazies manages to outshine Day in its bleak vision. The President appears (well, an actor of course), but his words will only make your blood boil. Romero’s vision is one with hardly any hope, the undertone you’d expect from a movie made in the years of Watergate and Vietnam, made by a director who isn’t afraid to show what’s on his mind (and nowhere does Romero do this more evident than in Diary of the Dead).
The good news is that Anolis Entertainment, an Austrian DVD company, have just released The Crazies. Limited to 1500 editions only, the double dvd release is available as a steelbook with many extras which focus on director Romero and star Lynn Lowry. Anolis is a name you may remember: they were also the ones who released that wonderful velvet edition of Blood and Black Lace (by Mario Bava). This should already tell you someone took care of this release, enough to make it a wonderful must-have.
The extras include two commentaries (one by Romero, one by Lowry), a featurette on Lowry (with the lovely title “The Mute Hippie Girl on Acid with Rabies”) and several trailers (for The Crazies and other films by Romero).
If you don’t own The Crazies by now, it should be one of your next purchases. There are several versions of the movie out right now, but this R2 double disc steelbook by Anolis give this essential Romero a look you’ll cherish forever.
(Anolis will refer you to Amazon.de, but you can also get the movie at Xploited Cinema.)
THE CRAZIES – 2 DISC STEELBOOK
Anamorphic widescreen (16:9)
Language options: English, German
Subtitles: German (optional)
Avenue Kurtodrome 
Very nice set I shall be looking for it.
The Crazies, steelbook?
Sounds good to me, and cheers for the heads up I had no idea this was about
…and I agree on your essential Romero, Martin is just brilliant, such a hypnotic film and I wish Romero would quit with the zombies and do some more of this stuff, hell, even Bruiser showed more of his talent than fucking Diary of The Dead.