31 Horror Movies in 31 Days: Martin

Martin (1976)

Directed by George Romero

Starring John Amplas, Lincoln Maazel, Christine Forrest, Elyane Nadeau, Tom Savini

A young man on train drugs a woman, slits her wrists, and drinks her blood. This young man is Martin; troubled boy and self-professed vampire. He’s prone to murdering women for their blood in addition to black and white dreams about romantic bloodletting and angry mobs. Martin is traveling to Braddock, Pennsylvania to live with his cousin Christine and his granduncle Tateh Cuda. Cuda is an old world Lithuanian Catholic who immediately sees Martin for who the monster he is. He warns Martin that he’ll kill him if anyone in Braddock is murdered. While working in Cuda’s butcher shop and getting seduced by lonely housewives, Martin struggles with his urges. How long can he keep secretly feeding his bloodlust before his family finds out?

This is one of George Romero’s best movies. It’s bristling with interesting ideas, unsettling scenes, and tension that doesn’t let up. Martin is a vampire movie, a slasher movie, and a mystery. Because of Martin’s visions of the past, it’s questionable as to what’s really going on with him. You could interpret the movie as Martin’s psychotic escapades and delusions of dark grandeur. Or you could see the film as a more grounded and well thought out vampire tale. Either way, Martin is a genuinely terrifying movie.

There are few special effects in Martin, but what does appear looks good. Mainly, the makeup effects are bloody. Syringes pulling fresh sanguine, dripping wounds and the like look credible. The real show stopper is when someone gets staked in one long, painful scene. The act of hammering a sharp piece of wood through someone’s chest is displayed in such an utterly convincing way that it’s almost hard to watch if it weren’t so terribly gorgeous.

John Amplas inhabits the role of Martin. He has an authenticity and charisma that make his misunderstood vampire/psychotic fetishist performance a thing of movie magic. Amplas makes Martin charming, flakey, sympathetic, and disturbing. Lincoln Maazel does well as Martin’s uncle and foil, granduncle Cuda. Maazel portrays a determined man stuck in his ways and unwilling to accept the more modern notion that vampires don’t exist. The rest of the cast is a grab bag of people who can mostly act (Christine Forrest, Tom Savini) and lots of bit players that really can’t. Luckily, the movie never feels poorer for it. It just shows the low budget, independent spirit of Romero’s early work.

Martin is a great Romero movie and a great vampire movie. It reinvents the cinematic vampire mythology while playing up the sexual violence undertone present in every vampire movie. Make the effort to find this movie and you won’t be disappointed.

10 out of 10

31 Horror Movies in 31 Days: Survival of the Dead

Survival of the Dead (2009)

Directed by George Romero

Starring Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Devon Bostick, Richard Fitzpatrick

A group of AWOL National Guardsmen are surviving in the post zombie apocalypse world when they come across a local named Patrick O’Flynn. He’s from Plum Island off the coast of Delaware. O’Flynn was recently forced off the island by his longtime rival, Seamus Muldoon. The O’Flynn’s have been killing the undead, while the Muldoon’s have kept them chained up waiting for a cure. The squad, led by the tough Sgt. Crockett, agrees that the island sounds like a great place to start over. The group sets sail for Plum Island, unaware of the horrors that await them.

I love Romero’s films, especially his zombie movies. Even when he re-launched the Night of the Living Dead concept with Diary of the Dead, I enjoyed Romero trying new things and trying to keep zombie movies fresh. So when I started Survival of the Dead, I was expecting high concepts and deep themes Romero loves to infuse into his ghoul stories. I was hoping that the declining quality of his recent work would be carried by a smart movie that’s well executed. I was so very mistaken.

Survival of the Dead is poorly directed, shoddily written, and all around stupid. The grand theme of this Romero zombie movie is the pointlessness of long standing feuds. Perhaps not as fertile ground as consumerism or the abuse of one generation by another, but it could still make for an interesting setup.

In a move that’s purely Carpenter, Romero used a zombie movie to make what’s essentially a western. Romero uses the idea to make a Looney Tunes-esque action romp with little going on otherwise. There are big explosions, bad CGI, and lots of shooting. All of it feels thrown together, the action lacks any real impact, and the computer effects are so prevalent. They’re aggressively bad and omnipresent. There’s also overly dramatic, almost campy dialogue. The characters are caricatures, and you end up not caring about any of them. Suddenly, you also stop caring about the movie altogether.

The cast more or less stumbles through the clunky script. Alan Van Sprang plays Sgt. Crockett like a cartoon version of Clint Eastwood: all grumbles and empty grit. Kenneth Welsh and Richard Fitzpatrick play the fighting heads of their respective families with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The two play way over the top and inexplicably sport full Irish accents, comically out of place for two Delaware residents whose families were there long before the apocalypse.

I don’t even know how this all went so wrong. This is the first Romero zombie film that feels lazy and offensively simple. Maybe he is slipping in his old age, or maybe he’s just out of good zombie ideas. Any way you look at it, Survival of the Dead is dead on arrival.

4 out of 10