Martin

“Things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic. There’s no real magic ever.” – Martin

Filmmaker George A. Romero is most well-known for his popular and highly influential zombie films. Their impact and legacy has been well-documented. It is the films he made between them that are also worth examining in particular a prolific period between 1971 and 1974 when he made four films exploring various genres, from the romantic comedy with There’s Always Vanilla (1971) to witches with Season of the Witch (1973) to the lethal outbreak film with The Crazies (1973). Martin (1978) was his low-key and incredibly compelling take on the vampire genre by creating a portrait of a young man who may or may to be a bloodsucker. The important thing to keep in mind is that he believes he’s a vampire.

We first meet Martin (John Amplas) boarding a train for Pittsburgh. He spots a beautiful woman (Fran Middleton) getting on and stalks her. Right from the start we are unsure of his motives. He goes into a bathroom and takes out a syringe and fills it with something. Is he a junkie? He breaks into the woman’s compartment and tries to surprise her. She sees him and they struggle as he injects the syringe in her. The nature of the attack and his undressing her once subdued suggests he plans to rape her. Instead, he takes out a razor blade, cuts her arm and drinks her blood. It comes as something of a shock as nothing leading up to this point has prepared us for this act. Despite his initial bumbling, Martin is careful. He cleans up the compartment after the attack. In a sly touch, now that it is day, Romero has the young man put on a pair of sunglasses.

Believing he is cursed with the affliction of being a vampire, Martin enlists the help of Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), his grand-uncle who takes him in after the death of the young man’s immediate family. Cuda is an old school Lithuanian Catholic who believes Martin is ancient vampire, constantly referring to him as “Nosferatu.” He even tells him at one point, “First, I will save your soul. Then, I will destroy you.” It is at this point that there are serious doubts that Martin is a vampire. Sunlight doesn’t burn him. He can bite into garlic. He can see his reflection. This begs the question, what is wrong with Martin? This is the mystery that the rest of the film explores.

Martin has a rich fantasy life that Romero occasionally shows via black and white footage reminiscent of a vintage Universal monster movie right down to the torch-wielding villagers. In these moments, he is much more capable and even a dashing vampire adored by his willing victims than what he is in real life, which is awkward and messy, like when he stalks a potential victim and upon moving in to attack accidentally interrupts her having sex with a lover, forcing the young man to improvise. As with his other films, Romero shows how the best laid plans can go awry as life is like that. People make mistakes, like in Night of the Living Dead (1968) when Judy is unable to free herself as she and her boyfriend try to get a truck and gas it up only to be engulfed in flames, or in Dawn of the Dead (1978) when Roger gets too cocky and is bitten by a zombie when he and Peter are fortifying the mall.

John Amplas is excellent as the disturbed Martin, a serial rapist/killer with his own specific methodology that ties into his delusion of being a vampire. It is a wonderfully nuanced performance as in some scenes he’s sullen and withdrawn (usually around men) and in others playfully enigmatic (usually with women). Romero doesn’t provide us with much of a backstory for Martin which forces us to figure him out based on what he does in the present.

Christine Forrest is also quite good as a sympathetic ear for Martin and a voice of reason in her father’s home. In a superbly acted scene, she finally confronts the old man on his delusional beliefs that Martin is Nosferatu and tells him that she is leaving to live with her boyfriend Arthur (Tom Savini). Lincoln Maazel delivers a solid performance as shop owner cum vampire hunter, convinced that Martin is a vampire. Cuda is just delusional if not more worse than Martin, prattling on like a low-rent Van Helsing, which only further confuses the young man. The veteran theatrical actor delivers a grounded performance for a role where the temptation would be to chew the scenery.

After making Night of the Living Dead, Romero made several documentaries to pay the bills. He was eventually offered $100,000 to make a low budget horror film. He remembered, “It was one of those middle-of-the-night ideas, which I first saw as something funny – basically, a vampire would have a hard time today! Nobody would pay him a lot of attention or get particularly shook up.” The filmmaker researched a series of actual vampiric murders committed by a Los Angeles-based slasher drinking his victims’ blood from goblets he brought with him. Romero also looked at vampiric lore, including an account of a clan of highway thieves in 14th century Scotland that lived in a cave, eating their victims’ remains.

He did so much research that he couldn’t decide which direction to take with the film. “I didn’t know whether I wanted my character to be a vampire or just think he was a vampire.” Romero got a better idea of what he wanted to do when he saw actor John Amplas in Philemon, a play about the persecution of a Christian disciple by the Romans at the Pittsburgh playhouse, which impressed him greatly. So much so that he wrote the titular character with the actor in mind. In addition to his leading man, Martin also saw the debuts of regular collaborators cinematographer Michael Gornick and Tom Savini who did double duty as special effects artist and appearing on screen as Christina’s boyfriend.

During filming Romero had a small crew of only 5-8 people on the set on a given day working 18-hour days. They were bolstered by the on-going romance between the director and Christine Forrest, an actress who moved back to Pittsburgh from New York City. They had met while making Season of the Witch and would end up eventually getting married in 1980.

Romero’s original cut of Martin came in at two hours and 45 minutes. He had originally envisioned it in black and white but unfortunately, he couldn’t afford to strike a negative of this version and had to cut it down to a more theater-friendly running time. Of the footage that was excised, Romero said, “little incidental characters became more important,” and “there was more stuff about the town and the decay.”

Martin opened in July of 1978. Newsweek’s Jack Kroll said, “Romero has become a dazzling stylist…his balance of wit and horror is the best since Hitchcock.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Despite the usual amounts of gore, this is a surprisingly tender, ambiguous, and sexy film in which Romero’s penchant for social satire is for once restricted to local and modest proportions.”

At one point, Martin says to someone, “Things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic. There’s no real magic ever.” This could be the central thesis for Romero’s early films as they are grounded in realism. Even the fantastical elements – the dead coming back to life – are treated matter-of-factly and juxtaposed with actors that look like and portray everyday people, inhabiting recognizable settings, like a farmhouse, a mall or the suburbs. As he did with Season of the Witch, the filmmaker shows his characters doing mundane things, like making dinner or going grocery shopping so that when something extraordinary happens, like someone dying, it has an extra punch to it.

Martin was a modest success but its legacy as one of Romero’s best films is firmly in place. It gave birth to two notable vampire films that couldn’t be further apart in tone – Vampire’s Kiss (1988) and Habit (1997). The former stars Nicolas Cage in an outrageous tour-de-force performance that takes Martin’s notion of a man who thinks he’s a vampire and runs with it to the extreme. The latter is Larry Fessenden’s gritty take set in New York City and examines a man who gets involved with a mysterious woman who may or may not be a vampire. Both films owe a huge debt to Romero’s film.

Late in the film Martin says, “If the magic part was real and you could make them do whatever you wanted them to do, then that would be different. In real life…in real life, you can’t get people to do what you want them to do.” Romero’s film is a melancholic portrait of a young man adrift in life with very little to anchor him to the real world, which may explain why he clings to the belief that he is a vampire. It gives his life some meaning and purpose in an otherwise meaningless existence.

SOURCES

Gagne, Paul R. The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh. Dodd, Mead & Company. 1987.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Bob and Harvey Weinstein must have been salivating at the prospect of teaming up Quentin Tarantino, red hot from Pulp Fiction (1994), and George Clooney, red hot from the television show ER, on a film. What they got wasn’t exactly a mainstream crowd-pleaser but rather a down ‘n’ dirty grindhouse movie called From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) that was several years before Tarantino and his filmmaking brother-in-arms Robert Rodriguez would make it official with the double bill of Planet Terror and Death Proof in 2007. The screenplay for Dusk Till Dawn had been kicking around for years, before Tarantino exploded on the scene with Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Rodriguez with El Mariachi (1993). The two filmmakers used their new found clout to push this pet project through the system: a drive-in movie on a studio-sized budget and with recognizable stars like Clooney, Harvey Keitel, and Juliette Lewis.

From Dusk Till Dawn starts off in familiar Tarantino territory with the Gecko brothers: Seth (George Clooney) and Richie (Tarantino), stone cold killers on the run from the law. It seems that Richie broke Seth out of prison and to celebrate the two have gone on a crime spree that has resulted in a bank heist and many dead lawmen. They are introduced in an exciting prologue that could be a mini-movie unto itself. A Texas Ranger (the always watchable Michael Parks) enters a liquor store in a tense yet chatty scene where he talks it up with the greasy-haired register jockey (John Hawkes). In Tarantino’s world, having the gift of the gab is essential to one’s survival and when a character runs out of things to say they tend to die. Pretty soon the Gecko brothers are walking out of an exploding store thanks to a well-aimed flaming roll of toilet paper.

They take refuge at a roadside motel with a female bank teller they took hostage from the bank robbery that is never shown (just like the heist we never see in Reservoir Dogs). Ritchie and Seth plan to make a break for Mexico and find safe haven in a place called El Rey (a reference to a similar place of salvation in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway). All they have to do is cross the border and meet their contact Carlos (Cheech Marin) at a biker bar called the Titty Twister. To escape the ever-increasing manhunt, the Geckos decide to hijack a Winnebago with a preached named Jacob (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his adopted son (Ernest Liu).

The Titty Twister turns out to be a really raunchy, biker bar/strip club where if you even look at someone funny you run the risk of dismemberment. But this is the least of their problems. It soon becomes apparent that this is no ordinary low life scumpit, but an ancient home to a rather large army of vampires. It is at this point that From Dusk Till Dawn mutates into a full-on, balls-to-the-wall horror film. The Gecko brothers and Jacob and his family are forced to defend themselves against hordes of the undead in a siege situation straight out of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) with a healthy dose of George Romero’s zombie films.

Robert Kurtzman of KNB Effects Group, a special effects company, had a treatment called From Dusk Till Dawn and was looking for someone to turn it into a screenplay. Writer Scott Spiegel (of The Evil Dead fame) had met and befriended a then-unknown Quentin Tarantino through a mutual friend. He recommended Tarantino to Kurtzman based on the strength of his Natural Born Killers screenplay. Kurtzman read and liked it and agreed to pay Tarantino $1,500 to write a draft of Dusk Till Dawn. While filming Desperado (1995) in Acuna, Mexico, Tarantino asked Rodriguez if he would consider directing his Dusk Till Dawn script that he had shown him briefly in 1992. The director agreed to helm the project with the only stipulation being that Tarantino would rewrite the script. He agreed and the project was a go, but only after the two filmmakers finished shooting their respective vignettes for the anthology, Four Rooms (1995), which featured two other up-and-coming indie filmmakers, Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) and Alexandre Rockwell (In the Soup). Without giving a chance for the buzz surrounding Four Rooms to die down, Rodriguez and Tarantino moved on to Dusk Till Dawn.

From the start, the two men established the agenda that their film would adhere to. As Tarantino stated in an interview, "The thing that's kind of cool is we're basically making this head-banging horror film buff drive-in movie with this really big-budget – and we're not pulling back. We're going for it." It is this kind of take-no-prisoners attitude that propels the hyperactive (and hyperviolent) narrative of From Dusk Till Dawn. The film marked Rodriguez's biggest budget yet at $18 million, but still small potatoes compared to a Sylvester Stallone film where $20 million of the budget goes towards the actor's salary. Like he did with El Mariachi and Desperado, Rodriguez uses all of his resources to make the film look better than it costs and gives the material his own unique spin despite the presence of Tarantino's obsessions which often threaten to overwhelm the film.

Rodriguez's influence lay in the origins of the vampires which were rather vague in nature in the script. The director decided to use his working knowledge of Mexican history and base the creatures' genesis on ancient Aztec and Mayan culture. "There were actual vampire Goddess statues and things during Aztec times ... So the idea is that this den of vampires in an old Aztec temple has, over the years, been turned into a sleazy bar in Mexico to continue to attract victims." It is this playful attitude towards his own heritage and the film's story, coupled with Tarantino’s strong script, which keeps From Dusk Till Dawn from slipping into self-parody.

This was the first film that demonstrated George Clooney’s ability to make the jump from the small screen to the big one. With the character of Seth Gecko, he isn’t afraid to portray an amoral criminal and yet Clooney’s natural charisma makes you like him. The actor is able to turn on the charm and also show a more intense side when someone crosses him, like the opening shoot-out in the liquor store. Unfortunately, this is one of the films that Tarantino acts in and demonstrates why it is better he stay behind the camera. He looks like someone trying to play a twisted criminal instead of becoming the character like everyone else. Tarantino even sports a ridiculous looking Burt Reynolds-circa-Deliverance (1972) haircut. His character’s death doesn’t come soon enough. It’s a credit to Rodriguez’s skill as a filmmaker and the strength of the material that the film isn’t ruined by Tarantino’s lousy acting.

It doesn’t hurt that there are plenty of distractions, like a showstopping scene where a scantily-clad Salma Hayek dances seductively with a rather large snake. Of course, she turns out to be the queen vampire at the Titty Twister. There are all kinds of inside jokes and references for genre fans, like a bit where make-up legends Greg Nicotero (who also worked on the film) and Tom Savini play rival bikers who have a disagreement. That is, until Savini shows off his crotch gun (first seen in Rodriguez’s Desperado). Another genre veteran Fred “The Hammer” Williamson also has a memorable turn as a biker who gets to deliver a monologue about the Vietnam War a la Bill Duke in Predator (1987).

Harvey Keitel gives From Dusk Till Dawn some much-needed gravitas as a preacher who has lost his way after his wife’s death and must find God again if his family and the others are to survive the vampire attacks until dawn. Keitel does a nice job of showing Jacob’s transformation from a faithless preacher to, as Seth puts it, a “mean motherfuckin’ servant of God.” In addition, several Rodriguez regulars show-up in supporting roles, like Danny Trejo as the Titty Twister bartender and Cheech Marin in an impressive three different roles.

Not surprisingly, this film divided critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and described it as “a skillful meat-and-potatoes action extravaganza with some added neat touches.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The latter part of From Dusk Till Dawn is so relentless that it's as if a spigot has been turned on and then broken. Though some of the tricks are entertainingly staged, the film loses its clever edge when its action heats up so gruesomely and exploitatively that there's no time for talk.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Rodriguez and Tarantino have taken the let-'em-eat-trash cynicism of modern corporate moviemaking and repackaged it as junk-conscious ‘attitude.' In From Dusk Till Dawn, they put on such a show of cooking up popcorn that they make pandering to the audience seem hip.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, “The movie, which treats you with contempt for even watching it, is a monument to its own lack of imagination. It's a triumph of vile over content; mindless nihilism posing as hipness.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle called the film, “an ugly, unpleasant criminals-on-the-lam film that midway turns into a boring and completely repellent vampire ‘comedy.’ If it's not one of the worst films of 1996 it will have been one miserable year.” Cinefantastique magazine’s Steve Biodrowski wrote, “Whereas one might reasonably have expected that the combo of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez would yield a critical mass of nuclear proportions, instead of an atomic fireball’s worth of entertainment, we get a long fuse, quite a bit of fizzle, and a rather minor blast.”

At its heart, From Dusk Till Dawn carries on in the proud tradition of other low-budget, gonzo horror films like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), while paying homage to classic horror films like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1979). Rodriguez admires these "lower budget, edgier kind of horror films, the ones where you didn't know what the filmmaker would do next. Because they didn't have any money, they would just try and grab you any way they could." Rodriguez and Tarantino now had the money to play with, but still maintained the low-budget aesthetic that they admired so much.

If the first half of From Dusk Till Dawn feels like a Tarantino film reminiscent of True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which feature amoral outlaws on the run from the law, then the second half is all Rodriguez as he lets his John Carpenter-esque freak flag fly for a blood-drenched finale with all sorts of creative deaths involving balloons filled with holy water, a crossbow and a disco ball. As with most of his films, Dusk Till Dawn is a fun ride with everything you could want from something like this: gun-totting criminals, tough bikers, cool action sequences, memorable dialogue, lots of inventive gore, and half-naked vampire strippers. What more could you ask for?