Your Daily Dracula – John Amplas as Martin Matthias/’The Count’, Martin (1976)
George A. Romero’s Martin (1976) is the most thoroughgoing, sophisticated re-examination of the vampire figure yet attempted. Outwardly a retarded teenager, Martin (John Amplas) claims to be eighty-four, but his kindly niece (Christine Forrest) and the audience can’t tell if he’s being serious. He dreams of a black-and-white 1920s in the Old Country, where a beautiful victim welcomes him as her lover. But in modern Pittsburgh the potential blood donors plaster their faces with mud and Martin is less fearsome than the cops and junkies into whose shoot-out he blunders. Like Count Yorga, Martin has tried to adapt (his nighttime prowls are assisted by hypodermic needles, safety razor blades and remote control gadgetry), but he cannot cope with human beings. He assumes a housewife who has seen her husband off on a business trip will be an easy kill, but is outraged and frustrated when he finds her with another man. Martin pours out his problems to a late-night radio phone-in, but all he gets is a patronising nick-name, ‘The Count’.
Romero’s Savant is Tati Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), Martin’s cousin, a green-grocer who screeches ‘nosferatu’ a lot and waves crucifixes and garlic at the Monster. Cuda takes the shame of his family into the house with a promise to destroy him if he kills anyone from the town. One night, Martin waylays Cuda, frightening him with a Count Yorga costume. He spits out the plastic fangs, wipes off the grease-paint, shucks the cloak and bites into a clove of garlic. As Martin says, ‘there’s no real magic’. Martin is Romero’s most deeply felt film and John Amplas gives the most successfully realised, non-comic book performance of his work. This vampire is a psychotic innocent, out of place in a horribly decaying neighbourhood. The resolution is traditional, but tinged with Romero’s habitual irony. Martin is about to conquer his obsession through a normal love affair with a neurotic housewife. Depressed beyond his power to comfort her, she slits her wrists. Cuda, thinking Martin is the murderer, drives a stake through his heart. Martin is buried in the back garden and his grave is seeded with grass. After the credits have rolled and the cinema is empty of all but the most devoted movie purists, the sound montage of the all-night radio show ends with a nervous voice. ‘I’ve got this friend … who I think might be The Count.’
Martin (John Amplas), who seems to be a withdrawn young man, commits a well-planned rape and murder on a train, though in his head he imagines a gothic romance version in which he’s a seductive vampire rather than a ‘freak rapist asshole’. Then, he arrives in Pittsburgh to be met by his nattily-dressed cousin Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), who labels him ‘nosferatu’ and announces that he will save his relative’s soul and destroy his body.
Director/writer George A. Romero would never be drawn on the ‘is he or isn’t he?’ question of whether Martin Matthias – who shares his surname with the vanpire figure played by Anthony Zerbe in The Omega Man – is a teenage serial killer who believes or pretends to believe he’s a vampire. Cuda and Martin agree on what he is, but differ on what a vampire is – an unageing monster, one of several born into the family thanks to a curse, or a mutant who exists apart from humanity but isn’t a supernatural being. Martin is either nineteen or eighty-four, one of the many sly bits of referential wit worked into a film – another is a fight between characters called Martin and Lewis – which interweaves poetic realism in its depiction of a decaying community left to rot by the recession of the streel industry with Martin’s attempt to continue his predatory pursuits – as much motivated by sex as bloodlust – without Cuda driving a stake through his heart.
It’s a complicated, sensitive piece, with remarkable work from Amplas in his only starring film role – rough around the edges (effects man Tom Savini would still like a retake for mismatched shots of a crucial gore effect flawed in the execution) but full of melancholy, disturbing sequences. At Cuda’ grocers’ store, Martin is harried and abused by his cousin’s elderly, aggressive female customers – while at the supermarket where he scouts for victims, women customers have to run a gauntlet of harrassing youths in the parking lot. Martin plans and executes his attacks meticulously, though his victims consistently refuse to play out the parts he’s imagined for them, while regular human crooks and cops and bystanders bungle bloodily through impromptu violent encounters Martin simply walks away from.
Martin is even honest enough to call up a night-time radio phone-in show to explain the vampire lifestyle – and becomes a minor celebrity nicknamed the Count, which prompts a quietly chilling, ominous post-credits musing I’ve got this friend … who I think might be The Count.’
From Sight & Sound
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