Rating: 2.5/5
Hooptober 3.0 | 23/31 | George Romero
Evans City, Pennsylvania Billy and his sister run around the house. Billy pretends to be a zombie and scare her. They hide when their father enters the kitchen with a crowbar, breaking everything in sight. Billy smells kerosene, and the two run upstairs to wake their mother. The sister pulls back the sheet to find her throat slit. When Billy turns around, his father throws a torch into the kerosene, setting the house on fire.
The fire siren pulls David and Judy out of bed. David joins fellow firefighter Clank on the scene. Judy, a nurse, goes to a doctor’s office to treat the burns on the surviving kids. When Judy arrives, Major Ryder and his team take over the office. The sister has died, and Billy is holding in.
The major explains that they’re quarantining the town due to a highly contagious virus codenamed Trixie. The armed military raid the houses while wearing hazmat suits, rounding up the town citizens. They confiscate all the weapons.
The doctor tries to sneak Judy out to avoid exposing her and the fetus gestating in her. No one else knows what’s going on. All we know is that whatever Trixie is, it turns people into homicidal maniacs.
The film explores government inefficiency in handling a crisis, even in a town as small as Evans City. Their martial law approach costs many lives, assuming everyone is too stupid to understand, let alone comply of their own accord. Our protagonists, however, also mistrust the military, as both are Vietnam veterans — they’ve seen their incompetence all too well. Still, they question whether they’re doing the right thing.
While we see the effects of Trixie on people, the military presence hits harder on the town’s citizens. It isn’t subtle.
At a house party, there is a guy in a green shirt and shaggy hair — if they didn’t model him after Shaggy from Scooby-Doo…
I saw someone call Nightmare City a boring version of this movie, but at least Nightmare City was fun. This one’s a bit of a tedious downer. I appreciate what it’s doing, and it is a better-made film — it just doesn’t hit like it might have at one point.