Martin
(Arrow PAL/Region 0 DVD)
(1978)
review by Blackgloves

Shot on sixteen millimetre and released in 1978 -- the same year as his classic "Dawn Of The Dead" -- "Martin" is one of George A. Romero's most thought-provoking low-budget horror efforts. A modern-day vampire fable set amid the shabby streets of the declining industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the film is a brooding, claustrophobic examination of social isolation and despair — and yet another brilliant Romero comment on the failings and frailties of human nature. It is also one of the director's most disturbing and, in the end, most moving movies.

Martin Madahas (John Amplas), makes a train journey from Ohio to live with his older cousin Tada Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) and his Grand Daughter Christina (Christine Forrest) in Pennsylvania. On the train he attacks a woman traveller in one of the compartments and, after a frantic struggle, injects her with a sleeping drug. He then rapes the unconscious victim before slashing her wrists with a razor blade and drinking blood from her gushing veins! Martin clears the scene of fingerprints leaving the impression that the woman has committed suicide.

The adolescent killer is met at the station by his austere cousin and taken back to the unassuming house where he and his grand daughter both live. Cousin Cuda makes it clear that he knows that Martin is "Nosferatu" and that he will save his soul before destroying him. The house is covered with garlic and crucifixes and Cuda has rigged up a bell to ring whenever the door to Martin's room is opened to alert him to the boy's comings and goings. Cuda warns Martin that if he goes near Christina or preys on anyone in the town, he will not hesitate to kill him! Martin mocks the old man's superstition - ripping down the garlic from the walls and cheerfully pressing a crucifix to his own skin to demonstrate that: "there is no real magic".

The next morning Martin meets Cuda's grand daughter Christina who sympathises with him because, like him, she has lived with the family's religious ravings and remonstrations against the so-called "family curse" her whole life. Christina feels trapped in her crumbling home town and longs to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Cuda's house. Cuda runs a small grocery store and Martin is employed to make deliveries to customers' houses; this affords the boy the opportunity to carry out more attacks, although he has to be extra careful lest he arouses the suspicion of his ever vigilant cousin. When Martin mets a lonely alcoholic housewife he begins a faltering sexual relationship with her -- but the clash between his newly aroused feelings for the woman and his continued need for blood has catastrophic consequences for everyone...

While most of Romero's most successful horror films have been grounded in the material world with their non-supernatural horrors presented in an immediate documentary style, "Martin" is Romero's attempt to deal with the mythic terrors of the human soul while still retaining that same style. In fact, it seems almost a direct response to William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist" which had been released a few years earlier, leading to a serious revival of interest in the occult. Fredkien's genius had been to present what, in the modern, secular world, should be unbelievable in a very direct realist style, tapping into atavistic fears and bringing them to the surface so successfully that the sense of evil as a malevolent force depicted in the film was palpable to the most hard-headed of viewers. Blatty is a conservative Catholic who sees the problems of the modern world as manifestations of a supernatural form of evil ."The Exorcist" is like a juggernaut of certainty in the existence of devils and evil spirits and his intention in writing the original book was to bring this world-view to a "modern" audience and to make them believe in it with equal certainty. It should come as no surprise that the film was approved by the vatican. In "Martin", Romero, a Catholic-raised secularist who's film making had always emphasised the uncertainties and contradictions of the human experience, took on the subject of evil and it's true nature, examining the clash between the kind of medieval world-view portrayed in "The Exorcist" and the modern one. The result was possibly his most sophisticated, multi-layered film.

The two character's at the centre of the film are Martin and his cousin Tada Cuda; Cuda inhabits a world where evil is a real, supernatural force and devils and vampires really exist, while Martin -- although he does need to drink human blood and commits murder to enable himself to do so -- appears not to exhibit any supernatural powers at all: Cuda's crucifixes and garlic have no effect on the boy and an exorcism fails to expel Martin's affliction. Indeed, Martin takes great delight in exploiting his cousin's superstitions, even, at one point, dressing up as Dracula (complete with false fangs and a cape) and reducing the old man to a quivering wreak. But when these trappings surrounding belief in supernatural evil are removed is there anything left of those beliefs? Or must we face up to the possibility that behaviour such as Martin's is just the extreme end of a very human pathology?

In the modern world Vampirism (or haemosexuality) is indeed a recognised, though rare, psychiatric condition - and often appears with necropilia and necrophgia (a pleasure derived from eating parts of dead bodies); the relationship between Martin and his cousin is reminiscent of a state called a folie a deux -- where a delusion spreads from one person to another when two people become isolated from the wider community. From a modern point of view Martin, who has been brought up to believe he has inherited the vampire curse, clearly seems to be a disturbed individual (his dreams are full of imagery derived from every vampire movie cliché ever made) and his cousin's world-view, a response to the collapsing certainties of a crumbling community. The steel industry that supports the town is decaying and crime and unemployment are rising. It's natural to look for a stable foundation to cling to in times of crisis and Cuda has the certainties of his faith to fulfil that function. This is Romero's response to the demon-haunted world conjured up in "The Exorcist". But as much as he recognises the pathology and harmfulness of a literal belief in "monsters" as external entities, Romero also recognises how intimately entwined in human psychology they are and, as a result, how persuasive such beliefs can be.

The film cleverly manages to portray this to the viewer by inter-cutting black and white scenes into the film which may represent Martin's deranged dreams or could simply be interpreted as being his memories if we literally believed Martin is an eighty-four year old vampire! The scenes are full of imagery we are used to seeing in vampire movies (torch carrying mobs and Gothic mansions etc.) and so carry an air of unreality with them; but they are edited into scenes in such a way as to suggest they could be memories since they often seem to echo what is happening in the main narrative. This ambiguity seeks to make the viewer taste something of Cuda's world-view without accepting it wholesale. Do Martin's visions represent a reality we have lost touch with or a harmful illusion we are being invited to share? Romero knows his audience will be likely to share some of Cuda's view of the world and makes sure the character is given rhetoric that will most-likely sound persuasive to large sections of the audience:"Do you really think the world is composed of the few sciences man has been able to master?…But people know so much, they think they know all. That makes it easy for Nosferatu. That makes it easy for all the devils."

At one point in the film, Romero appears in a cameo as a liberal Catholic priest who comes to visit Cuda. When the old man asks him if he believes in devils, Romero's young priest can barely contain his mirth and simply evades discussion of the subject out of embarrassment (Romero's script sneaks in a reference to "The Exorcist" during this scene). The scene emphasis how powerless modern psychological understandings of "evil" are in fulfilling basic emotional needs for some people, while also proposing that the medieval world-view is just a way of evading the unpleasant aspects of human nature by externalising them as monsters and devils. Romero spells it out in the liner notes that come with this latest DVD edition:

"Have we conjured up creatures and given them mystical properties so as not to admit that they are actually of our own race? Do we make them extraordinary out of guilt for what we instinctively recall of our primitive past? Do we need amythical whipping boy to punish brutally for our primitive past?"

The film once again conveys Romero's view of human nature as being composed of contradictory needs and irreconcilable differences but aside from all the dry, philosophical punditry, it has also to be mentioned that "Martin" is one of Romero's most unnerving horror films -- full of some very shocking imagery. Martin's attacks are very disturbing to watch especially a scene where he terrorises a woman and her lover in the woman's house. The documentary style and the harshness of these scenes foreshadows "Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer" by many years. It is all the more astonishing that the character of Martin ultimately seems quite sympathetic despite his horrifying crimes. This is because, despite going all out at various points to make the vampires and devils of Cuda's world seem like a reality, we are also forced to see Martin as a lonely, lost human-being and relate to his position as such. The film's brutal climax (it will leave you gasping, I promise you!) presents us with a question: do we deal with people like Martin with a stake through the heart and a handful of superstitions? Or do we try to understand them as human beings, and, perhaps, thereby understand the monsters inside us all?

Arrow films present the movie in it's original aspect ratio of 1:33. The transfer is acceptable but not really any improvement on the previous region 1 release from Anchor Bay. The film could certainly have benefited from a restoration job such as that which was recently given to another low-budget Romero film "The Crazies", by Blue Underground, but this version is certainly perfectly watchable. The mono audio is also quite clear and free of pops and hiss.

Extras wise, Romero fans are fairly well serviced here: we have the usual poster and stills gallery, TV and radio spots, and the original theatrical trailer. These will actually be of some interest to the viewer since they both contain material that is not in the actual film. The trailer is built around a scene of John Amplas, in character as Martin, siting in a train compartment speaking to camera, with scenes from the film edited in. Interestingly, the black and white scenes from the film are here shown in colour. These scenes look almost Argentoesque since they are full of saturated reds and blues; they actually come over as being even more unreal than the black and white versions — since the colour is so much more vivid than the washed out look of the main film! The TV spot is similar, but this is built around a scene of John Amplas sitting on a stairway speaking to camera. The main extra is a hilariously po-faced German documentary examining Romero's career up to and including "Dawn Of The Dead". Confusingly, the documentary includes an interview with Romero which is overdubbed with a German voice-over which is then translated into subtitles! Something seems to have been lost in the double translation since the subtitles make little sense and, judging by what can actually be heard of Romero's original comments beneath the german overdub, bear little relation to what he was actually saying! The final item of interest will be Romero's own liner notes (written in 1977) which give the director's own view on the film. This goes some way to making up for the lack of the commentary track which was included on the previous Anchor Bay disc.

Overall, this is a fairly good disc of an excellent Romero film that certainly deserves to be sought out by all fans of the director's work.