Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Micransix Crappy film

Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

edeighton Eric Deighton's review of "Martin"*spoilers alert*"There isn't any magic. It's just sickness." says Martin (John Amplas) in response to Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), his old-country Catholic uncle. George Romero delivered a movie that strips away all magic from the vampire mythos and replaces it with the gritty realism of sickness...so of course it was filmed on location in Pittsburgh in the Braddock neighborhood. The extras were local residents from the Braddock neighborhood of Pittsburgh and this movie really reminded me of the year I spent in school in Pittsburgh. George Romero cast his own wife, Christine Forrest, as the female lead "Christina". She has a very pretty but vaguely Eastern-European look as does Lincoln Maazel who plays Uncle Cuda. For some reason these characters seemed very familiar to me and oddly comforting. Many of the extras and actors and actresses looked like other people I had encountered during my own time in Pittsburgh, twenty years after this film was made. The music in this movie is a haunting religious sounding score. The shots of daily life in 1977 Pittsburgh were useful in grounding this vampire movie and presenting vampirism as just another shitty disease. Rather than exhibit mystic powers to lure and attack his victims, Martin is an awkward young man who stalks very average non-glamorous women and injects them with drugs and even then only barely beats these women in battle. Then Martin sucks the blood from their unconscious bodies after slicing them open with a razor blade. Martin then hides his crime by making the woman's death by making it look like a suicide. Braddock is one of the most run-down sections of Pittsburgh — the decay evident in the movie contrasts nicely with Martin's fantasies, shot in black and white like a romantic vampire movie, where women willingly give up their throats to him. Pittsburgh (similiar to Cleveland) has always been a talk radio town so the scenes involving Martin calling into a local DJ ring true. Martin becomes a regular caller known as "The Count" on a late night radio show. I enjoyed the movie and will probably check out other Romero movies.

GL84 Arriving in Pittsburgh, a young man visiting his cousin realizes that his vampire nature is continually getting the better of him as he stalks the residents of his small-town and finally forces those around him to put him away for good before his rampage puts the family in danger.For the most part, this one is quite an unconventional and troublesome effort. Most of the film's problems actually center around the fact that the change done to the central figure brings about plenty of rather troubling inquiries. By shifting away from the traditional form of the bloodsucker who now doesn't need piercing fangs to drain his victims and can't pass the curse on like a transmitted disease, much of the fear is taken completely out of the main character who now comes off merely like a nominal psychopath. Drugging people and using razors to slice them open so he can feed are tactics that just don't in the slightest appear to induce fear or scares in the main lead, and since this is the attack method for the film that leaves so many of the scenes without any kind of tension that usually appears in the genre's efforts. The fear mainly comes from his antics and the fact that he's going around on the prowl, but that doesn't generate as much as the more clichéd elements generate which is why those clichés are often featured since the behavioral changes don't really make this feel like a true horror film. That also reduces the actual stalking scenes into an incredibly tired and laughable tactic of him hitting and running away which is completely against the normal vampire rules of attack that the extended nature of these scenes are caused merely by the inclusion of such behavior changes. Likewise, there's also the fact that the film's desire to spend a vast majority of time on the home-life between the family where everyone's continually trying to get through their lives without being interrupted by his condition makes for some really bland and boring scenes as the family dinners or scenes of him out delivering meals from his work that are just so dull and bland. They're just so uninteresting that there's little about these that raise the film up into any kind of watchable status as so little of the film really strikes a chord, even the other subplots such as the affair with the housewife or his cousins' desire to start her own life which take up so much of the film. With so few attacks here to really generate any kind of interest, the film is instead forced to try a series of incredibly artistic and rather bland tendencies to try to generate interest in between these segments, either by going for a series of haunting black-and-white flashbacks to silent sequences showing him at work or preparing to go out which injects some life in the film but really highlights how few scenes of him attacking others there actually are in the film. Those, though, are where the film actually works the best by providing this with so much of its original moments. The opening action-packed attack on the train is rather chilling with the darkened stalking, the brawl in the car and the eventual aftermath of what happens gives this a strong opening. The lengthy attack on the cheating couple is rather enjoyable, despite the length because of his attack style, and the finale in the shop makes for a nice conclusion which is rather frenetic and ends on a fine note. It does get points for creativity, but that's about all it has going for it.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Full Nudity, Graphic Language and drug use.

Red-Barracuda George A. Romero changed modern horror with his debut feature, Night of the Living Dead. He has now become synonymous with the zombie sub-genre but he also directed other very interesting films of different types. Perhaps his best of these is Martin, shot on grainy 16mm, its very low budget and low-key yet very intense in places. Like David Cronenberg's later film Rabid (1977) it takes the vampire film and revises it, albeit in a very different way. A shy teenager called Martin moves to a dilapidated Pittsburgh suburb to stay with his uncle Cuda who is convinced he is a vampire, tracing his curse back to their Eastern European descent. Martin also believes himself to be a vampire but not of the traditional supernatural type. He habitually attacks and drugs young women only to then slash them and drink their blood.Like other Romero films, this is another horror film which is far better written and acted as is usual for such low budget fare. It works on a few different levels and combines the psychological drama with vampire film and serial killer flick. The result is impressively original. The characters are far from one dimensional. Martin is played very sympathetically by John Amplas, yet we know he murders young women; Cuda is overbearing and bullish, at the same time his harsh attitude towards Martin is hardly entirely wrong. So right away, we in the audience are not given the usual clear cut characters to root for or dislike. Amplas is really very good and on the strength of this he should have had a great acting career, while Lincoln Maazel is also very strong as Cuda. The remainder of the cast are also impressive and put in naturalistic performances, including Romero himself as a priest.Whether or not Martin is really a vampire remains essentially ambiguous and it is left to the viewer to decide. The black and white sequences could be fantasy or they could be a distant moment from the vampire Martin's past. My guess is the former but it can be read in different ways. What is for sure though is that the iconography of the vampire film is modernised considerably. Rather than fangs and cloaks its razor blades and hypodermic needles. Not only this but Martin's vampiric urges seem to stem from a dysfunctional sexuality, unlike the libidinous actions of Dracula. He becomes an anonymous local celebrity when he becomes a regular caller on a night-time radio talk show, even here he is not taken seriously but it proves to be the only place where he can express his inner thoughts. Martin's attacks are almost a substitute for his impotency. The confrontational and disturbing opening sequence on a train illustrates the films decidedly modernist approach to this material. A second extended house invasion scene is even more unusual in its dynamics. The film ultimately ends with a final moment of visceral horror which is sudden, shocking and darkly ironic. Martin is a real triumph from Romero and one of the smarter horror films out there.

lastliberal I wasn't exactly sure whether Martin (John Amplas) was a vampire or a necrophiliac. He is not your usual vampire, if he is one. He has no fangs and goes out in the daylight. He uses razors and syringes to draw blood. Is he real or just delusional? His cousin Tada (Lincoln Maazel) is a strange one.Romero, who also plays in the movie, is trying to take us in a different direction here. Just as he made a statement on consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, he is making a statement on religion in this film. It will not meet the needs of the horror-obsessed, but it is true horror; more in the Taxi Driver mode.It really gets funny when he plans a kill and gets a big surprise.He finally manages to hook up with a depressed housewife for what he calls "the sexy stuff," but that ends badly and Tada finally loses it.It won't be for everyone, and you will never know if he is a vampire or just psychotic.