Director: George A. Romero
Screenplay: George A. Romero
Starring: John Amplas, Lincoln Maazel, Christine Forrest, Elyane Nadeau, Tom Savini
Release Date: July 7, 1978
Martin Mathias (Amplas) is a very confused, lonely teenaged boy who is sent to live, under extremely vague circumstances, with his great granduncle Tateh Cuda (Maazel) in the rough neighborhood of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Cuda is an extremely old-school Catholic who knows about Martin’s secret, a supposed family curse that has passed down through several generations. You see, Martin is a vampire. Well, sorta. Sunlight has no effect on him. Neither does garlic, or crucifixes for that matter. He claims to be 84 years old, but he only looks to be about 16. And he has no fangs or special powers, either, which makes it difficult to quench his bloodlust. Each act of murder he commits is carefully planned, as he sedates his female victims with a syringe and has sex with their unconscious bodies before slicing their wrists with a razor blade and drinking their blood.
MARTIN is perhaps the strangest and most oddly compelling vampire movie I have ever seen. The film was written and directed by horror master George Romero during the awkward period between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF THE DEAD when he was struggling to find his identity as a filmmaker. With MARTIN he certainly found his voice, telling a story of vampirism that strips the legend of all romanticism, reducing it to it’s cold, ugly reality. Whether Martin is actually a vampire or just the tragic by-product of inherited mental illness matters little, as the fact remains that he has a lust for blood that needs to be quenched. As with the zombies in his …OF THE DEAD trilogy, the vampirism on display in MARTIN acts as a metaphor, in this case for the hardships of adolescence as Martin struggles to connect with the people around him in some kind of meaningful way.
In his portrayal of Martin, John Amplas is somehow able to draw a surprising amount of sympathy for a character who is, in the end, a serial murderer and rapist. Incredibly shy and with a lanky build, Martin is not at all malicious towards his victims, and in fact goes out of his way to make sure their deaths are as peaceful and painless as possible. Romero makes effective use of his immense skills as an editor in these scenes, cross-cutting the horrifying reality of Martin’s crimes with black and white visions in Martin’s mind in which he sees himself as a romantic figure whose victims beg for his deathly embrace. These visions pop up at numerous times throughout the film, and any time Martin is in danger of being caught we see this same Gothic version of himself being chased by a torch-wielding mob. It is never made clear if these visions are actual memories from long-ago, or just Martin’s fevered daydreams of how he’d wish to be perceived.
The movie has no real structure, simply following Martin through his day to day life as he works at Cuda’s grocery store, ignoring the old man’s religious abuse, and striking up a friendship with his daughter Christina (Forrest), who has grown weary of her father’s insistence that their family is cursed with vampirism. At night he calls in to a local radio show and, using the alias of “The Count”, talks to the host about what life is like being a vampire and, while discussing his difficulties in dealing with Mrs. Santini (Nadeau), a housewife whom he delivers groceries to who quite obviously wants to sleep with him, confesses that he’s never engaged in the “sexy stuff”, as he calls it, with anyone who was awake.
Even though Martin is clearly a monster who needs to be stopped, I still found myself feeling a strange degree of sympathy for the character. In the end he is just a confused young kid who is dealing with growing up and the bitter realization that, as he puts it, “There is no real magic…ever.” It’s a feeling that I think everyone can relate to, as we’ve all gone through that awkward stage at some point in our youth. Martin, unfortunately, deals with his inability to communicate his feelings in the least healthy way possible, aided in no small part by his Uncle’s religious fervor.
As the film progresses Martin begins to open up more to the people around him, striking up an affair with Mrs. Santini that seems to temporarily quench his desperate need to relate. For a while it seems like Martin might be on his way to achieving some degree of normalcy. But life is cold and cruel, and Martin has blood on his hands. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD before it, Romero ends the film with a cruel bit of bitter irony that while it may be tragic, is not entirely undeserved.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but MARTIN might replace DAWN OF THE DEAD as my favorite film in Romero’s canon. The filmmaker achieved here the perfect balance of social commentary and gruesome horror for which he is lauded, but did so in the service of a story that I found very relatable. This is horror film set in the real world, populated by very real people who seem like more than characters, all of them with their own fascinating tics. It can be extremely disturbing and a bit icky when it comes to the scenes of vampirism, but I think anyone who considers themselves a fan of the genre or George Romero should give this one a chance. MARTIN could be Romero’s masterpiece, a gem of a movie that is overshadowed by his admittedly monumental …DEAD trilogy. As much as I love those films, I feel like they have also been what dragged Romero down as a filmmaker. Once he became stereotyped as “the zombie guy”, it seems like those are the only types of films he could get made. It certainly seems like that’s all he’s been interested in making for the last decade, with sadly diminishing returns. MARTIN is proof that Romero is capable doing more than just zombie splatter epics, and was at one time a filmmaker with a genuinely unique voice.
My Rating: 10/10
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