- AKA “Code Name Trixie”
- Directed by George A. Romero
- Written by Paul McCollough, George A. Romero
- Stars Lane Carroll, Will MacMillan, Harold Wayne Jones
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyHyp7hmmsA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Almost right away, we find out that it’s a disease causing the problems, and it’s being handled by the military. It’s still pretty horrifying and tense, but it’s more of a medical action thriller than horror. The 2010 remake really played up the zombie effects of the disease, and that movie took quite a while to reveal that it was just a military bio weapon that leaked. There’s a lot of shouting and shooting, so it’s a loud movie, but overall pretty gripping and entertaining.
Synopsis
A little girl gets a drink before bedtime. Her brother Billy is annoying. He starts acting like a zombie, but then their father goes berserk and starts wrecking the place. Their mother is a bloody corpse, and then the father sets the house on fire.
The town fire alarm goes off, and David, a volunteer fireman, doesn’t hurry to get out of bed. Judy gets a call from her boss, Dr. Brookmeyer, about the little kids being burned. At the fire station, one of the men says he saw a couple of truckloads of soldiers on the road.
When Judy arrives at the hospital, there’s a doctor there wearing a gas mask. There’s a bunch of military here, and they’re taking over. Major Ruder says they are sealing off the town.
The firemen, including David and his friend Clank, give up on the burning house. The father is locked up in the back of the police car; he’s freaking out about what he’s done. The doctor warns Judy that there’s a super-infectious disease on the site, and he wants her to get away from people– to keep her coming baby safe. Judy sneaks out the back door.
The deputy tells the sheriff that the soldiers are setting up roadblocks and not letting anyone through. David and Clank go after Judy. A plane crashed that carried Trixie, an experimental vaccine that may be spreading. They call the President to order that a plane with an atomic bomb come over, just in case they need to sterilize the area.
Dr. Watts, one of the developers of Trixie, is forced onto a plane at gunpoint, leaving his equipment behind. Meanwhile, the soldiers clear out the high school, the motel, and everywhere else. They start rounding everybody up. Colonel Peckham arrives, much to Major Ryder’s relief.
Peckham admits that Trixie was developed to be a biological weapon, not a vaccine. There’s a struggle, and the sheriff is shot. Some of the locals don’t want to be rounded up, and start shooting back.
David, Clank, and Judy are captured by the soldiers and put into the back of a van. One of the passengers is sick. They fight back and escape, picking up Kathy and her father along the way.
Dr. Wells says that in three years of research, they were never able to find an antidote; it’s going to spread throughout the entire town. You either die or go mad and die within two days; it’s_ always_ lethal. He wants to send out blood samples so the guys back in the lab can study them, but there’s no way to get helicopters in right now.
It’s martial law. Colonel Peckham orders that resisters and the infected are to be put down.
David and his crew are still hiding in the woods but it looks like Kathy may be infected. They find out about the plague and the cause, but Clank starts acting more and more… crazy. So does Kathy’s father, who starts getting really frisky with his daughter. Clank breaks that up, and a bit later, the father hangs himself.
David spots soldiers moving on their position and he and Judy run off. Kathy goes out to greet the soldiers, having lost her mind. They shoot her. Clank realizes he’s got the bug and decides to hold back and fight the soldiers while David gets away. Clank actually does kill all the approaching soldiers except for the one who shoots him.
Dr. Wells has found a cure, and he prepares a sample to take to the lab outside. On his way to see Peckham, he’s rounded up by the soldiers and put in with the infected. There’s a riot, and he’s killed.
David and Judy make it to the perimeter. He builds a hiding place for her and then goes off to find a hiding place for himself. Judy seems to have lost her mind; has she got the disease or is she just really upset? David kills a soldier and steals his white suit. Some locals come out of nowhere and kill Judy. A bunch more soldiers arrive and capture him.
The government calls, and there are signs of Trixie in Lexington. Colonel Peckham needs to relocate there now that he’s got experience. He goes through decontamination and then gets airlifted out by helicopter.
Commentary
After the first ten minutes, pretty much all the dialogue is shouted, screamed, yelled, or otherwise loud. It gets going right away and never lets up.
It was from 1973, so it’s obviously very dated, but everything unfolds in a realistic manner, and in many ways, this is the way something like this would actually play out.
We watched the remake of “The Crazies” from 2010 a few months ago, and it’s essentially a zombie apocalypse movie. This one is the same basic story at the core, but this is much more from the point of view of the military.