Martin

The quandary is swiftly defined, modern industrial decay (cf. Loden's Wanda) and persistent old fables, "nosferatu." The eponymous lad (John Amplas) is "one acquainted with the night," downcast, slender, "unbalanced" by the weight of family albums and sacramental paraphernalia. His vision of himself as an octogenarian bloodsucker replaces fangs with razor blades, his method—sticking victims with narcotic syringes, slurping dolefully from slashed wrists—is demonstrated on the train ride from Pittsburgh to Braddock. His elderly uncle (Lincoln Maazel) receives him with Old World hisses: "First, I will save your soul. Then, I will destroy you." Cultural rot and loneliness make for a void morbidly filled, the jovial local padre crosses himself ineffectually, a big fan of The Exorcist. The folklore of garlic and crucifixes avails the patriarch no more, the "magic" of vampires amounts to outdated Universal flashes (maiden with candelabra, torch-bearing mob, creeping mist) unspooling inside a misfit psyche. "Someday maybe I'll do the sexy stuff awake, without the blood part..." George Romero's tenderest and saddest masterpiece, not his Vampyr but his Day of Wrath. The harrowing bravura of the protagonist's raid on a suburban adulteress and her lover in the middle of the night is set against the true horror of stunted lives and confused rebellion, plainspoken snapshots of existence in a depressed circle. Adolescence and its thirst, a certain kinship with Hitchcock's The Lodger, delicate themes and exhaustive analysis. In the land of belief hardened into prejudice, a woeful housewife (Elyane Nadeau) plays Lucy to the spindly "Count": "Boy, do I wish what you have is catching." The punchline is that the bite is fake but the stake is real, with Romero moving devastatingly from homemade Mantegna composition to salted flower bed as tragedy dissipates into talk-radio fodder. With Christine Forrest, Tom Savini, Sara Venable, and Francine Middleton.