Martin (1978)

The 1970s probably saw the rebirth of mainstream but not so traditional though horror fiction in pulp novels, movies and tv shows in the business. The not so great 1970s did spawn a great deal of a worrisome, conservatively inclined thinking among the public (let's not leave out European giallos and terror efforts.) Upcoming terror and horror directors such as George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven all got on the horror bandwagon with early efforts such as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Halloween". They were all set in the  world of American reality and everyday times and locations. As hard as this was to truly make happen, they truly made it happen in such a place and time to hold  onto. These were trying days in the modern Western world, they delivered some true fables on the darker side of modern life and living.

There is a great deal of the everyday world in his return movie "Martin" (1978). He has a sense of the sunshine world of his home filming site of Pittsburgh, Pennslyvania. This serial killing case study with the young actor Martin Amplas, a Romero favorite from other efforts and Romeros tv works, is watchable in a younger actors much advertised working efforts. A young Tom Savini has a guest role as a partygoer and Romero has a guest role himself as a failing expert on vampiric lore. Romero has an eye for purely everyday faces and their tortures in the horrific surroundings and stories he does as a storyteller have come in fate or morality to prick them.

The best thing about this effort is the very well done use of Pittsburgh, Pennslyvanian locations that the production doesn't waste. There are so very many eerie distented camera shots and location work of the local area that one sees. There is a harsh looking color film stock that's used in this to show an everyday American set world with its urban to modern alienation that's as hard to fully take to an audience member as possible.

 The crop of then functioning serial and mass murderers that seemed to take on the national dream life of that section of the public mind that's always so fascinated by the fairly monstrous in the human mind "Martin" was an early example of the serial killer sub genre (Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Powell's "Peeping Tom" are an early duo that should be mentioned). "Martin" is a low to medium budget terror plot that effectively uses the alienated almost dead zone look of  Pittsburgh in those years, their effectively chilled, unwelcoming and almost bare look that the antihero finds himself in.

 There is the psychological fact, terrible to behold of all documented mass murderers and  serial stalkers that they have no real psychological or personal connections to others, even family ties to others.  "Martin" is an early example of this rare but still used trope of some movies of this genre. It's  blue collar to lower middle class sense of the American everyday Dream of their grandparents and parents times and family treatment has become a psychotic private world of  murder, psychopathy and alienated baseness to their final, personally apocalyptic  ends. Romero  was a very observant dark comic on the modern American semi set of personal crimes to disaster laden badly lived lives that are ended in these terror tales.

Finally As Michael Weldon once noted "this movie is just too pessimistic, grim and shut off  to be a popular success" but it brought back Romero to moviemaking, brought the American style of terror movie to fruition and gave the current crop of mad criminal movies a good vampiric  twist of the nighttime tale for grateful cult audiences in the nighttime theatres.

the Vampire

The Hunt

At Night

The Uncle

The Stop