Review – Martin

I’ve seen this movie three or four times now, and the thing that keeps bringing me back is that I want to like it more than I do. This is a post-Night and pre-Dawn offering from George Romero, but here we’ve got a vampire rather than zombies. Or do we? Martin (John Amplas) has an obsessive thing for blood, but otherwise he’s more of a garden variety psychopath than a supernatural creature of evil. Indeed, Romero deliberately flaunts vampire conventions throughout the story. This bloodsucker doesn’t even suck blood. Lacking the hypnotic charm of a Dracula, he can only get victims by injecting them with sedatives and then bleeding them with a razor blade. The production has a working-class Pittsburgh look and feel, further departing from the European flavor of the traditional, goth vampire. I dearly love the concept. I’m just left somewhat flat by the execution. Mildly amusing