Review: Martin (1977)

Writer/director George Romero is best known for his Living Dead movies, including Night of the Living Dead (remade in 1990), Dawn of the Dead (remade last year), Day of the Dead (not remade yet, but you just know it's coming) and, most recently, Land of the Dead. And that's as it should be--Romero's zombie flicks have been amongst the most influential and popular films in cinema history.

Unfortunately, the very popularity of those films throws a very long, very deep shadow on all of his other work, including Martin, which may well be his most intimate, personal and--dare I say it?--best horror film of all.

Martin (John Amplas, who looks at times like a young Johnny Depp) is a young man who believes that he's a vampire. This idea doesn't sit well with his parents, who send the weird, introverted kid from Indianapolis to live with his elderly cousin, Tada Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), in Pittsburgh. But even before Martin gets off the train, he fights, drugs, drains and has sex with (yes, in that order) a woman he stalks on the trip.

Once Martin arrives in Pittsburgh, the cousin continually calls him a "nosferatu" and tries to subdue him with garlic, crosses and an attempted exorcism. Martin is a thoroughly modern vampire, though: he goes about his business during the day, looks at his reflection in the mirror and even becomes a regular on a late-night talk show, where the host refers to Martin as "The Count." Cuda's granddaughter, Christina (Christine Forrest, who later became Mrs. Romero), thinks both Cuda and Martin are crazy, especially when she finds out that both of them believe that Martin is 84. Still, Cuda hires Martin to work in his deli as a delivery boy--an opportunity Martin uses to strike up a friendship with a lonely divorcee (Elyane Nadeau) while scoping out victims for future bloodletting.

Martin carries out his attacks with a combination of meticulous planning and an amazing ability (honed by decades of experience?) to improvise when the planning goes awry, his first-person perspective often shifting from color (the here-and-now) to Universal horror films-style black and white, which is either how Martin sees the world through the distortion of his dementia or a series of flashbacks (or what Martin thinks are flashbacks) to his encounters with willing victims and angry, torch-bearing villagers.

In an age that has seen similar depravities in real life--most notably the case of Jeffrey Dahmer--Martin has actually taken on greater resonance in the years since its initial, limited release. Even more remarkably, while Romero's script and Amplas's performance don't make the lead character sympathetic--we can't (or, more accurately, don't want to) relate to his actions--they don't make Martin a one-dimensional monster, but a significantly flawed, mentally ill human being who nonetheless has thoughts and emotions that better-adjusted human beings have as well. His loneliness and emotional isolation ring true, even as he commits acts of depravity. (Martin's victims are often naked, and he clearly gets off on slitting their wrists and drinking their blood.) Even the ending, which in retrospect seems entirely predictable, still comes as a shock because the scene before it is one of quiet, almost gentle humor and because the ending itself is so abrupt.

Martin comes across like a project that Romero took great care with and invested with much emotion. Consequently, our reactions to it are stronger, and it takes on a timelessness that allows it to become more meaningful as the years go on. Romero and Amplas humanize a character that, in other, less talented and involved hands, would have been just another inhuman slasher--Martin predicts the more modern trend of turning serial killers into media darlings. And making him more human and more understandable makes the whole thing all the more unnerving.