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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very modern vampire movie., April 22, 2002
'Martin' begins with a sequence one might more readily associate with the overwrought films of Dario Argento, but filmed with the dispassionate intensity of a Robert Bresson. We see a gentle, shy young man boarding a train headed for Pittsburgh, eyeing a pretty young woman. Because this is a horror movie, we assume he is a serial rapist or killer, and his precise use of tools - an anaesthetic so that he can violate his unconscious victims - furthers the suspicion, as do the usual screams, tussles and shredding of clothes. But there are three breaks from the exploitative norm in this sequence. First is the unsettling meekness of the attacker: far from being shadowy, violent and menacing, he tries to genuinely soothe his victim. Secondly is that Bressonian style I mentioned - no camera movement; the dynamics of the action proceeding by clean, propulsive, interlocking editing that emphasises objects and the hands making ritual use of them. The style distances the exploitative content, and suggests a meaning or purpose beyond the generic norm. Thirdly, Martin is not a rapist or psychopathic killer, but a vampire - the moment his fellow passenger zonks out, he slits open her arms and gorges. Martin is being sent to his granduncle, an elderly Catholic shopowner who lives with his granddaughter, and who intends to save Martin's soul before destroying him, as if the boy were a drug-addict undergoing cold turkey. As he did with his classic zombie films, Romero takes a horror myth long made ridiculous by parody and camp, and firmly fixes it in the contemporary world, through which prism is presented a satiric view of modern captalism, consumerism, the media, gender, racial and class politics, work, families, a culture of confession etc. Though nominally 84, Martin is in his late teens; part of his problem is that his bloodlusting has diverted him from consummating the other kind of lust. Stuck in a town stale with old folk, the young having long emigrated in search of work, he finds himself an object of interest for bored housewives, with his pious grandfather more like a stern parent who won't let his son go out late. The familiar vampire myths are sent up, mostly during Martin's conversations with a talk radio host, but also in a paralell narrative iintercut with the modern story, a fey, grainy, monochrome pastiche full of candelabra, lipsticked Counts, nubile Hammer horror dames and rampaging vigilantes. The fragmentation of action instigated by the Bressonian editing soon transfers to the narrative itself, which splinters down bizarre byways, with Martin as a mysterious Fantomas-style haunter of pristine bourgeois homes, supple and fleet in a tight black costume. As ever with Romero, sobriety and earnestness are meticulously built up to such an intense pitch that the only release is in a baffling comedy that doesn't negate what went before, but renders the film even less graspable. He is aided in this by a brilliantly, flute-flitting score that switches between menace and mirth without ever revealing the joins.
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