To me, this movie is perfection.

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

"Martin" follows the titular character, an awkward young man who has delusional fantasies about being a vampire. After relocating from Indiana to a small Pennsylvania town, he moves in with his cousin and aged grand uncle, where his vampiric tendencies begin to spiral out of control.One of George Romero's more understated offerings (I'd liken it in tone to his offbeat 1973 effort, "Season of the Witch"), "Martin" is as much a psychological character study as it is a horror film; in fact, it's something of a collision of the two. The film begins with a disturbing date rape scene-turned-bloodletting that is discomforting to say the least. This sets the tone for the remainder of the film, which is downbeat and atmospherically dreary, largely evoked through the idyllic small-town sets and emotive camera-work. Black-and-white photography is utilized to full effect for the vampiric fantasies, which are surreal and eerie.The success of the film largely depends on John Amplas's performance as the title character, and he does the character justice. Martin is both sympathetic and abhorrent, disturbed and misunderstood—the balance struck between both extremes is nuanced, and the tension within the character's identity is where the majority of the film's power lies. The conclusion of the film is in line with its downbeat tone, and renders the film something of an unexpected modern horror tragedy.Romero has said that "Martin" is his favorite of all his films, and it's understandable why. It feels like one of his most personal works (perhaps his most personal), and Martin as a character is able to evoke a multitude of feelings from the audience. The film is both disturbing and amusing, horrific and depressing—it also maintains a high-brow aesthetic throughout in spite of its budgetary limitations. An understated, atmospheric, and compelling character study that functions just as well as a horror film. 9/10.

Believing himself to be an 84-year-old vampire, Martin (John Amplas) kills to feed his thirst for blood, using a syringe to drug his victims and a razor blade to slice open their wrists. Will moving in with his elderly cousin and his granddaughter be his salvation or his downfall?George Romero is best known as the zombie guy, his non-living dead films receiving nowhere near as much attention as his celebrated 'of the Dead' series. It's a shame, because his work outside of the zombie genre contains several gems of the macabre that are just as worthy of attention as those featuring grisly gut-munching ghouls that have returned from the grave.Romero's 1976 'vampire' movie Martin, for example, takes an intelligent, innovative, and admirably ambiguous approach to its subject matter, yet still delivers enough genuine horror, shocks and bloodiness to appease those looking for more basic thrills.Martin's carefully planned assaults on his victims are brilliantly staged exercises in tension and fear, yet they make the viewer continually assess and question what they have seen. Is Martin really 'Nosferatu', his condition the result of a terrible family curse, or have his deranged relatives from 'the old country' warped his mind with their superstitious clap-trap?Romero never lets on either way, thereby making his film's shocking, bloody conclusion all the more powerful. Clever stuff indeed.

I saw this film a few years ago, so my memory isn't great... Martin is a film I first saw as a matinée for 50p, and I wish I could get that back. First of all, the picture is HORRIBLE. It all seems just... sh*t. I know it was the 70s but they should have had some production values. It might symbolise something, but I don't get it at all. Secondly, the ending seems rushed. I mean really, really rushed. All I remember was "NOSFERATU!" *stab* Finally, I was shocked that it was George A. Romero who made this. I can't say it's all bad, It is possible to look at it as a vampire satire. (Although, again,if it was I definitely missed that), plus it isn't as bad as the vampire abomination that is Twilight.

When I said in my review of his legendary Night of the Living Dead, that George Romero is a horror director with a very inconsistent record, this film sticks out most in my mind as proof of that struggle. Between trying the hardest to be a character study and having to fill out the genre requirements to be sold as a horror film. For his sake, I'm thankful that much of his work feels like it's straining to be horror. Because were it not to add those elements, I wouldn't be interested in seeing his films at all. Without the threat of zombie invasion, 1985's Day of the Dead would be a painfully tedious and irritatingly over the top war flick about people yelling at each other. 1978's Dawn of the Dead would be an action film about people trying to survive the breakdown of society from... what would most likely be anarchy caused by widespread riots and outbreaks of street crime (the sort you'd see in something like 1979's The Warriors or 1978's Saturday Night Fever), were you to take out the zombies. 1973's The Crazies would lack the tragedy to make the boring military effort to contain the outbreak of disease worth watching.And 1976's Martin would be a lame art film about a lanky, skinny dork walking around the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, watching the people interacting and realizing his upbringing was just not normal. Which is what most of Martin is anyway, save for a half dozen scenes of Martin stalking women, drugging them, then raping them and cutting their wrists so he can suck their "blood," which looks so much like melted-crayons, you'll wonder why the strangely un-vampiric Martin likes to drink it so much. All while the fairly mopey boy narrates almost every shot he's in. And he's in almost every shot. I was once told that narration is the last resort of a screenwriter, a product of desperation. In Martin, rather than Romero using the narrations as a tool of creepy foreshadowing, it's more to provide internal reflections over why Martin is doing what he does. Which, not to beat on a dead horse but, is really quite boring. As is the character of Martin. Who is the entire film.Is Martin a vampire or is it in his own head? Good question. My answer? I don't care. What I want most from a horror film, regardless of how ambitious it is or not, is to be entertained. All said and done, a horror film being scary is a great thing. But it's a luxury. Something I just can't expect from every horror film I see. So, I try to go with the flow. So, how does Martin flow? Quite well, all things considered. Romero does have a style to most of his films. And even though I find The Crazies to a better final film (partly because of the fact that it looks haphazard stylistically, and documentary-like), Martin is a better film in terms of style or atmosphere. Romero is the horror King of library music tracks, which has always bothered me. But, maybe I should lighten up on that. As a matter of fact, I'll never know or never care to know where the original tracks came from. So, the usage of this music by Romero's films is like sampling the flavor of music at the time. One of the few things I truly like about Martin is that I remember the music. The hallucinogenic, reverberating, trapped-in-a-glass-jar quality to most of the pieces.The other thing Martin really has going for it is Martin's amusing reactions to 1970's America. If he really was an 80-something year old vampire with almost no exposure to American culture outside the occasional children's novelty toy or magic tricks, watching him browse through stores and his amazing reaction to the sight of a suicide victim, is downright priceless. Romero's foremost focus in Martin is irony. And the film is chock full of incidences of that. Usually, it's nothing impressive. But one scene really blew me away. Martin breaks into a thrift shop at night, which trips off a burglar alarm. The cops are quick to arrive and Martin has to cut it close to evade capture. This scene is the pinnacle of Romero's brand of suspense. As Martin clings to the walls and ducks and dives around objects to hide himself from the cops' eye- I'm on the edge of my seat. Martin leaps out the door and flies through the streets, desperately looking for somewhere to hide out. As he enters the first dark place he sees, he finds himself in the hide-out of some kind of black gang. Because of Martin, the police have inadvertently caught more criminals. But brilliantly, the two sides have a shoot-out and everyone dies... everyone except Martin.Now, that's a stroke of genius. Irony is what makes it happen. But what makes it so enjoyable is that it is completely unpredictable. Though there are several other scenes in Martn that are unpredictable, none are as filling as this one. Perhaps the film's greatest attribute is that it serves as something of a response to the pressure from Christians or Catholics to conform to what is a normal manner of behavior, etc. When Martin is seen as having "unnatural" impulses, his religious Uncle (was he his uncle? I don't remember) brands him as evil and Satanic, etc. This is some small comfort for the viewers who have experienced psychotic religious people before in their lives, and living in America- it's almost impossible to avoid all of them. But, consider this: I'm getting schooled in religious ethics by a film whose main character is raping and killing women. Which is my second biggest complaint about the movie (the first is how boring Martin the character is). I guess I understand why he wants to rape the women. But, why do I want to watch him doing it?