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Martin (John Amplas) is a vampire, though not in the traditional,
mythical sense of the word, but a sexually repressed young man who gets
turned on by first drugging girls, then stripping (& probably raping)
them & in the end cutting open their wrists & drink their blood.
During this act, he has some kind of fantasy that he is a vampire-style
dark seducer, but he knows actually he is just a sick & confused young
man.
His reactionary uncle Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) thinks differently though,
he fears Martin is the real McCoy, a vampire only afraid of crucifixes
& garlic who can only be killed by a proper staking - however, uncle
Cuda employs him as delivery boy for his grocery store, but warns him that
if he kills only one person, it's stakes for him ...
During his daily rounds delivering stuff, Martin gets to know a lot of
lonely & frustrated housewives, & before long he has picked
himself a perfect victim (Sara Venable). Only when he breaks into her
appartment, he finds her with another man (other than her husband that
is)... & suddenly Martin finds himself having to kill him &
drinking his blood before burying him in the housewife's garden. Her he
only drugs & rapes ... but she won't tell anything to anyone, 'cause
she is afraid of her jealous husband ...
Eventually shy Martin makes friends with another of these frustrated
housewives, Mrs Santini (Elyane Nadeau), & the 2 become lovers, &
with Martin finally having proper sex, his blooddrinking urges seem to
diminish.
Still, his uncle doesn't give up to try to destroy the vampire he
sthinks Martin is, even enlisting the aide of an exorcist (J.Clifford
Forrest jr), which of course doesn't impress Martin one bit ... on the
other hand though he fails to convince his uncle he is not a real vampire.
Then though uncle Cuda's daughter Christina (Christina Forrest), one of
Martin's very few friends, leaves for the city, & Martin feels more
left alone than ever, his social contacts becoming reduced to the host of
an all-night call-in radio-show, who repeatedly makes fun of him on the
air ... & then frustrated Mrs Santini kills herself too, with a
razorblade (just like Martin, once upon a time, has killed his victims).
All this leads to Martin's bloodlust taking over once more, & soon
he gets into a ffrenzy & kills a few hobos, but soon the police is
after him. Trying to escape though, Martin accidently gets into the
hide-out of a druglord ... & suddenly this culminates in a shootout
between police & the druglord's men ... with only Martin surviving.
Back at home, later that night though, he wakes up, & sees his
uncle leaning over him with hammer & stake, & finally good uncle
Cuda kills him, because he thinks Martin has kille Mrs Santini (curiously
enough one of the few characters in the film with whose death Martin had
nothing to do) ...
Differing vastly from George Romero's debut Night
of the Living Dead, or from his other horror output, Martin is
something like a dark satire, a satire on the vampire lore as such (please
note, satire, not parody) as well as a satire on suburban life, where
everybody has so much of everything one just has to be frustrated. &
in this film, the hero-villain dichotomy of traditional vampire movies is
somehow turned topsy turvy: the only character one can identify with/feel
for, is actually a bloodthirsty beast (if not in the traditional vampire
sense, which makes it even worse), while the one who stops the beast (the
hero in the classic context) is a reactionary bigot one just can't help
but hating - & consequently, he kills Martin for all the wrong reasons
(he blames him for his girlfriend's suicide).
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