Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111433 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-06-20
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 95 minutes

Amazon.com
Martin (John Amplas) is a modern sort of vampire--he gains his victims' cooperation with the use of a hypodermic needle instead of hypnotism, and uses razors in the place of fangs. "There's no real magic," he says. "There's no real magic, ever." He says this to his elderly Romanian cousin, Tati Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), a true believer in the old religion, and self-appointed keeper of Martin, who threatens to do away with the boy if the vampirism doesn't stop. According to Cuda, the boy is actually 85 years old--young for a vampire. Truly, the supernatural element of the film is always at odds with psychological explanations that make Martin out to be a sexually disturbed teen, not an ancient bloodsucker. Martin's vampiric episodes are intercut with sepia footage of similar exploits from some gothic era, which may either be Martin's memories or his imagination; take your pick. Garlic, sunlight, mirrors--these are devices of Hollywood, and have no effect on a hypo-toting vampire like Martin, as he explains the rules in his role of frequent call-in guest on a radio talk show where he's known as "The Count." These ambiguities are left teasingly unresolved by the film, which is more interested in establishing the relationship between the traditional vampire and the modern-day psycho. Along with the film's narrative economy, these ambiguities make Martin Romero's midnight-movie masterpiece.

At the very end Romero borrows an image from Carl Theodore Dreyer's classic silent film Ordet, ratifying a moment of religious ritual. Knowing this as you watch the film only deepens the chill. --Jim Gay

Customer Reviews

One of the best and most moving vampire films of all time
George A. Romero's "Martin" is a nearly perfect film. While firmly rooted in the postmodern, "Martin" also gives the attentive viewer a good idea of how vampire myths may have originated; with the hysterical superstitions of old Europe trying to come to grips with a serial murderer like the eponymous Martin, played convincingly and sympathetically by John Amplas. Filmed in an economically depressed steel town in Pennsylvania, this film echoes "Nosferatu" (1922) in its depiction of a moribund city devoid of youth and life. Shot in 16mm, "Martin" is strangely beautiful, and a perfect visual documentation of the mid-1970s. Amplas makes one of the most memorable vampire protagonists in the history of film. Even in a tight yellow t-shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, he exhibits as much sinister grace as Christopher Lee, Delphine Seyrig, or Max Schreck. "Martin" is easily one of the best and most strangely moving vampire films of all time.

The Shy, Teenaged, Virgin Nosferatu. How Interesting!
Poor, Martin (John Amplas) just happens to be an 84 year old vampire in a shy, teenaged, virgin boy's body.

Martin gains his victims' cooperation with the use a needle and drugs instead of the usual power of hypnotism that vampires are supposed to have, and uses razors to slice forearms & necks in the place of fangs. Martin's vampiric episodes are intercut quite nicely with black and white footage of an earlier period in his life.

Crosses, garlic, sunlight, and mirrors have no effect whatsoever on Martin. He explains that things of that nature are just superstition & Hollywood's idea of vampirism.

George Romero paints a lovely horror picture with this film made in 1976. Highly recommended for any vampire lover or Romero fan. Most excellent!

A very modern vampire movie.
'Martin' begins with a sequence one might more readily associate with the overwrought films of Dario Argento, but filmed with the dispassionate intensity of a Robert Bresson. We see a gentle, shy young man boarding a train headed for Pittsburgh, eyeing a pretty young woman. Because this is a horror movie, we assume he is a serial rapist or killer, and his precise use of tools - an anaesthetic so that he can violate his unconscious victims - furthers the suspicion, as do the usual screams, tussles and shredding of clothes. But there are three breaks from the exploitative norm in this sequence. First is the unsettling meekness of the attacker: far from being shadowy, violent and menacing, he tries to genuinely soothe his victim. Secondly is that Bressonian style I mentioned - no camera movement; the dynamics of the action proceeding by clean, propulsive, interlocking editing that emphasises objects and the hands making ritual use of them. The style distances the exploitative content, and suggests a meaning or purpose beyond the generic norm. Thirdly, Martin is not a rapist or psychopathic killer, but a vampire - the moment his fellow passenger zonks out, he slits open her arms and gorges.

Martin is being sent to his granduncle, an elderly Catholic shopowner who lives with his granddaughter, and who intends to save Martin's soul before destroying him, as if the boy were a drug-addict undergoing cold turkey. As he did with his classic zombie films, Romero takes a horror myth long made ridiculous by parody and camp, and firmly fixes it in the contemporary world, through which prism is presented a satiric view of modern captalism, consumerism, the media, gender, racial and class politics, work, families, a culture of confession etc. Though nominally 84, Martin is in his late teens; part of his problem is that his bloodlusting has diverted him from consummating the other kind of lust. Stuck in a town stale with old folk, the young having long emigrated in search of work, he finds himself an object of interest for bored housewives, with his pious grandfather more like a stern parent who won't let his son go out late.

The familiar vampire myths are sent up, mostly during Martin's conversations with a talk radio host, but also in a paralell narrative iintercut with the modern story, a fey, grainy, monochrome pastiche full of candelabra, lipsticked Counts, nubile Hammer horror dames and rampaging vigilantes. The fragmentation of action instigated by the Bressonian editing soon transfers to the narrative itself, which splinters down bizarre byways, with Martin as a mysterious Fantomas-style haunter of pristine bourgeois homes, supple and fleet in a tight black costume.

As ever with Romero, sobriety and earnestness are meticulously built up to such an intense pitch that the only release is in a baffling comedy that doesn't negate what went before, but renders the film even less graspable. He is aided in this by a brilliantly, flute-flitting score that switches between menace and mirth without ever revealing the joins.