Entertainment
How George A. Romero's Extremely R-Rated Sci-Fi Was Overshadowed By The Living Dead Franchise
By Brian Myers
| Published
Director and screenwriter George A. Romero has long been regarded as the godfather of the modern zombie film. The late filmmaker certainly earned that moniker, with his debut feature Night of the Living Dead forever changing Hollywood’s conception of what these undead creatures are. In the decades that followed his 1968 opus, Romero continued the “Living Dead” saga with five additional films. Remakes and spinoffs from other filmmakers followed, each one paying homage to the original master to varying degrees.
But somewhere in between the film that began his career and its 1977 follow-up Dawn of the Dead lies a largely forgotten sci-fi horror movie that deserves its due. Far from the successes that any of Romero’s zombie films enjoyed, the 1973 film The Crazies is certainly one worth revisiting.
A Sci-Fi Horror Slaughter
The film opens in a farmhouse occupied by a family of four. While the two young children are playing, the father comes into frame, destroying everything in his path with a crowbar. As the young girl runs to her mother’s bedside for help, she makes a chilling discovery. The woman had been beaten to death while she slept.
The father then ignites the kerosene that he dumped all over the floors of the house and sets it aflame. The two children escape with severe burns and are tended to in the local clinic. When nurse Judy arrives to help the town doctor, she is greeted by a group of men in full HAZMAT gear who are scrambling to set up and distribute equipment. As Judy tries to make sense of what is happening, she overhears a heated conversation between Dr. Brookmyre and the military officer who has seemed to take over the clinic.
Major Ryder reveals that a devastating bio-weapon, code-named “Trixie,” was accidentally released into the local water supply days before when the military plane carrying it crashed near the town of Evans City, PA. The chemical infects those exposed to it with a highly contagious disease that causes homicidal mania in those who survive initial exposure.
With a mandated press blackout and a government quarantine that has sealed off the community, the townspeople are cut off from the outside world. Donning gas masks and white protective gear, military personnel go from home to home and round up citizens, herding them into the school gymnasium. Anyone who attempts to run is shot on sight.
More Layers Than Your Typical Romero Film
The Crazies brings three forms of horror onto the screen for audiences. Initially, the concept of madness from an unknown disease is a terror that viewers are forced to reckon with when the farmer goes berserk during the opening moments of the film. A more realistic horror then begins to unfold as the military is shown forcing its way into homes and executing civilians. Finally, the dangers of mob mentality grip you with fear. The civilians who evaded capture (some infected with the virus, for sure) began to revolt and kill the soldiers. While an understandable reaction, it’s this very mentality that leads to the devastating fate of the town and possibly the rest of humanity.
The Crazies packs in multiple chilling scenes, making it worthy of a Romero film. In one sequence of events, a farmer begins shooting troops out of his window as his wife attacks one with her knitting needles. These acts of desperate violence play out while the couple’s young daughter plays the piano, seemingly oblivious to the carnage that is unfolding in front of her.
In another scene, an infected minister is shown running from his church with a can of gasoline. As he screams prayers, he douses himself with fuel and lights himself on fire.
The film is a quick burn (no pun intended), with jarring action from the opening frames and throughout its entirety. As with so many other Romero films, the real horror in The Crazies is the one that man brings on himself. The director can bring to life a realistic man vs. man conflict without the zombie makeup or grotesque special effects, giving audiences a good sense of how these circumstances could play out in reality.
Reimagined For A New Generation
Following the success of Romero’s Land of the Dead in the early 2000s, Paramount Pictures began to develop a remake of his overlooked masterpiece. After early negotiations fell through, the project was picked up by the now-defunct Starz Network vehicle Overture Films in 2008. With a modest budget of $20M, director Breck Eisner reimagined Romero’s early 70s feature into a vividly terrifying 101 minutes on the big screen.
Timothy Olyphant (Justified, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) stars as the Sheriff of the fictional rural community of Ogden Marsh, Iowa. Though the remake incorporates the bioweapon being released into the town’s water supply via a military plane crash, that’s where most of the similarities with the original end. It’s still a solid watch through and through.
You can stream the original version of The Crazies for free with Tubi. The big-budget remake is currently available on the Roku Channel.
Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
Entertainment
I tested the top MacBook alternatives: See which Windows PCs actually beat Apple
The 2026 Dell XPS 14 is a stylish investment for aesthetic-forward power users — I’m thinking content creators who might also be occasional gamers. You’re probably wishing the 14-inch MacBook Pro was even sleeker and a little more portable, and you may be getting impatient waiting for Apple’s touchscreen OLED upgrade. You’re definitely open to carrying around dongles.
I tested two configurations of the handsome XPS 14. The one I recommend as the best MacBook Pro alternative is an upper mid-tier model with an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor and a dazzling tandem OLED touchscreen (an optional upgrade). It’s no battery life champ, but it keeps pace with the base Pro in multi-core workloads, and its integrated GPU is excellent for demanding creative software and casual gaming.
The XPS 14 is easily one of the most elegant laptops I’ve ever encountered. Dell trimmed down its all-aluminum design for 2026, making it a touch thinner and nearly half a pound lighter than a 14-inch Pro. It’s available in two MacBook-y finishes: graphite and shimmer (coming later this year). Its lattice keyboard takes some adjusting to if you’re used to regular island-style keyboards, but it translates to a modern, minimalist look. Its seamless glass haptic touchpad looks equally clean. Its speakers are above-average for a Windows laptop — they’re just a little more echoey than a MacBook’s.
The XPS 14’s 2.8K OLED display is a $150 upcharge that I can endorse. It’s not as bright or crisp as a MacBook Pro’s Liquid Retina XDR display, but it’s more vibrant and just as smooth. (The standard IPS version is much duller in comparison.) Keep in mind that OLED won’t be a thing on a Mac until late 2026 at the soonest.
The Core Ultra X7 chip is a close rival of Apple’s M5 chip when you work it hard. It doesn’t feel as snappy in single-core scenarios, but trails the current MacBook Pro by only four percent when used for multi-core tasks. (That’s nothing.) What’s more, the Core Ultra X7’s Intel Arc B390 iGPU is comparable to an entry-level discrete graphics card. It’s perfectly capable of running graphically taxing titles like Cyberpunk 2077 with the help of games’ AI upscaling tech.
The XPS 14’s stamina is lacking compared to the M5 MacBook Pro, though it really depends on what you’re using it for. It held out for 10 hours and 19 minutes in our video rundown test, which is a full workday at least, but not great. (Its Apple counterpart ran for over 21 hours in the same test.) That said, its 120Hz OLED display dips down to just 20Hz when you’re viewing static content, so it should last much longer when it’s not looping a video.
If you want an XPS 14 with MacBook-beating battery life in almost any scenario, look into the $1,999.99 base model with a Core Ultra 5 325 chip. It lasted 22 hours on the dot in our video rundown test, and its refresh rate can drop to a mere 1Hz for static content. Just know that you’ll sacrifice a good chunk of power: It offers 35 percent worse multi-core performance than the Core Ultra X7 version. Speed-wise, it’s most akin to an M2 MacBook Air from 2022. (The cheaper Dell 14S with the Core Ultra 7 355 chip performs slightly better and lasts even longer, FWIW.)
With trade deadline approaching, Hunter Goodman and Rockies take on Royals
Trade talk circling as Tigers open series vs. Athletics
