8. The Crazies (1973)
Directed by George Romero, The Crazies features a nasty little virus called Trixie which turns sufferers into homocidal maniacs. Men wipe out their families, a farmer commits arson, an elderly woman kills a soldier with her knitting needle, a man rapes his daughter. Apparently an army plane crashed while carrying an untested bio-weapon - Trixie - which has tainted a reservoir in small town Evans City, Pennsylvania, infecting everyone who has tap water supplied by it. The army is sent in to contain the outbreak but inevitably cannot control the collective power of Trixie working on so many civilians. A vaccine is possible but the army are so gung ho they inhibit its production by Dr Watts. They force him to work in a high school lab where the crazies are also quarantined and then they mistakenly shove him in with the crazies after he has developed a possible vaccine. We see the broken test tubes containing the vaccine shattered after the crazies push Dr Watts down the stairs... Romero shows he is not a one trick zombie pony. He builds up an hysteria right from the beginning to the point where we don't know who are the 'crazies' and who are just trigger happy civilians. Nothing is ever safe in the film and it must rank up there with the best virus films despite some clunky acting, budgetary constraints and repetitive sequences. It highlights the horrors of biological warfare which is an issue as pertinent (maybe even more so) as it was in 1973 as it is 40 years later.