Martin (1977)

          Among the many reasons why Pittsburgh-based horror icon George A. Romero is unique among his shock-cinema peers is the fact he possesses two equally important directorial personalities. Romero is best known for making over-the-top zombie flicks that are distinguished by witty social satire—and yet he also made a series of quiet horror films, of which Martin is arguably the best. Presenting an offbeat spin on vampire mythology, Martin leads with disturbing psychological aspects, even though it also contains plenty of unpleasant gore. So, while Romero’s Dead movies feature flamboyant allegories about topics including consumerism and government conspiracies, Martin and its ilk tell even creepier stories about the monsters walking the streets of the real world. It’s giving nothing away to say that Martin is actually more of a serial-killer saga than a proper vampire story, and that’s why the movie has the power to get under viewers’ skin. Since we all know what sort of damage the world’s wounded souls can inflict upon innocents, it’s difficult to dismiss Martin by saying, “It’s only a movie.”
          The movie opens with a gruesome sequence that’s so methodical it feels relentless. Young everyman Martin (John Amplas) stalks a young woman on a train, subdues her with drugs, strips her naked, and then molests her inert form while slashing her wrists with a straight razor so her blood is a sort of sacrament on their unholy coupling. Yikes. Then Martin arrives in Pittsburgh, where he’s given lodging by an eccentric relative, Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), and Cuda’s granddaughter, Christine (Christine Forrest). Rather than being some benevolent guardian, Cuda is a living incarnation of religious superstition. Descended from a long line of Eastern Europeans, Cuda believes his family is cursed with vampirism, and that Martin is the clan’s current victim. Therefore, Cuda considers it his responsibility to monitor Martin’s nocturnal behavior. Through black-and-white flashbacks, writer-director Romero reveals how Martin’s personality was formed during his upbringing by parents who shared Cuda’s belief system. This creates a fascinating question of whether Martin was naturally inclined toward murder or if the family’s insane lore became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
          Filled with unsettling images and worrisome notions rather than sharp jolts—with a few notable exceptions—Martin benefits from Romero’s signature grungy aesthetic. The filmmaker’s use of real locations (and real people) ensures that Martin never feels like some slick Hollywood fantasy. Instead, it’s akin to a combination of a newsreel and a nightmare. And if the plotting gets a bit repetitive in the middle, that’s a minor flaw seeing as how Martin is sandwiched by the aforementioned opening scene and a final sequence that’s just as alarming. FYI: As with most of Romero’s work, this picture is not suitable for squeamish viewers, and if Martin catches you in the right frame of mind, it will stay with you in ways that you will not enjoy.

Martin: GROOVY

The Crazies (1973)

          Returning to the horror genre after a detour into romantic comedy, Pittsburgh-based indie icon George A. Romero cranked out two shockers in 1973, including this bio-terror flick and the quasi-supernatural melodrama Season of the Witch. Neither represents the filmmaker’s best work, although it’s easy to spot within The Crazies many tropes that fans adore in Romero’s zombie flicks. Like The Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, The Crazies focuses on a small band of survivors who find themselves caught between a mysterious plague and the overzealous military personnel assigned to contain the plague. The cure, as the saying goes, is worse than the disease.

          Shot throughout rural Pennsylvania, The Crazies begins with a gruesome scene of a crazed man murdering his wife and burning down his house with his children inside. Next, the picture cuts to a local clinic, where a small-town doctor treats the crazed man even as soldiers show up at the clinic door. It seems an experimental biological weapon was accidentally released, and that most people exposed to the chemical agent will become psychotic. Our heroes include the nurse and several other people with natural immunity. Using local actors instead of Hollywood players, Romero creates a sense of documentary-like realism, an effect accentuated by his unglamorous camerawork.

          At its best, The Crazies feels like a newsreel capturing the end of man. However, the use of semiprofessional actors frequently backfires, with many scenes falling flat due to inert performances, and Romero spends so much time cutting back and forth between underdeveloped characters that The Crazies unspools more like a series of loosely connected vignettes than an actual story. Some of the stuff in the movie is effective, some is merely gross, and some is genuinely disturbing, but the sum effect is less than Romero could have achieved by applying more discipline to his storytelling. Even the juiciest subplot, stemming from the realization that one of the “immune” survivors has turned psycho because the virus took a while to infect his bloodstream, feels predictable.

          Still, this subject matter exists solidly within Romero’s wheelhouse, and the notion of an airborne toxin changing normal people into murderers is unsettling no matter the context. And despite failing to cause a stir during its original release, The Crazies eventually gained enough stature to earn a 2010 remake starring Timothy Olyphant.

The Crazies: FUNKY

Season of the Witch (1972)

          Following a brief detour into romantic comedy, of all things, Pittsburgh-based indie filmmaker George A. Romero—the man behind 1968’s Night of the Living Dead—returned to low-budget horror for his third movie, which has been released under several titles but is primarily known as Season of the Witch. Featuring such Romero signatures as dreamlike portrayals of violence and snarky lampooning of middle-class values, the movie generally has more attitude than it does impact, and it also takes quite a while to get going. Yet once Season of the Witch reaches cruising altitude, it presents a handful of dynamic scenes as well as a somewhat interesting portrait of the main character’s existential malaise. Headlining a no-name cast, Jan White stars as Joan Mitchell, the suburban housewife of a macho businessman who alternates between abusing her and ignoring her. Longing for meaning in her life, Joan visits a medium who turns out to be a full-fledged Wiccan, and this encounter leads to Joan’s experimentation with witchcraft. Also woven into the storyline are Joan’s adulterous affair with an obnoxious man and her fraught relationship with her teenage daughter, who considers Mom an impossible square and therefore doesn’t suspect that Mom’s up to something freaky.

          As a narrative, Season of the Witch—or, if you prefer one of the film’s earlier titles, Jack’s Wife or Hungry Wives—is something of a dud. Suffice to say, domestic drama is not Romero’s strong suit as a writer. Worse, the photography in most scenes is flat and ugly, though Romero somewhat predictably finds his cinematic groove during terror scenes. Another problem is that Joan doesn’t become fully indoctrinated into the supernatural world until about 55 minutes into the most ubiquitous version of the movie, which runs 103 minutes. (Unexpurgated prints are over two hours long, which seems like it would be an interminable running time given how much filler is present in the 103-minute version.) Despite these flaws, Season of the Witch is an interesting footnote to the career of a director closely associated with over-the-top gorefests, because Season of the Witch proves he can create disquieting effects without showing viscera. In fact, the movie’s creepiest scene is probably the vignette of Joan pleasuring herself while listening to her daughter get it on with a boyfriend in the next room. Calling Dr. Freud! The recurring trope of Joan dreaming about a masked home invader works well, too, and a shopping montage set to Donovan’s eerie ’60s song “Season of the Witch,” the inspiration for the film’s title, has some ironic bite.

Season of the Witch: FUNKY

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

          The saga of horror auteur George A. Romero’s career is filled with copyright disputes, editorial interference, and financial shenanigans, so even the release of his most successful film, Dawn of the Dead, has weird baggage. For instance, Romero first delved into the zombie genre with his acclaimed debut, Night of the Living Dead (1968), an indie success that fell out of Romero’s hands and into the public domain. When he returned to the genre for this film, he wasn’t authorized to create a proper sequel, so made a loosely related follow-up—and whereas Night is a contained thriller with a small cast, Dawn is epic by comparison.

          Ostensibly picking up where Night left off, even though no characters recur from the first picture, Dawn begins mid-action: Frenzied technicians at a Philadelphia TV station cover the story of a worldwide zombie outbreak, because some unknown X factor has caused the deceased to climb from their graves and feast on the living. Eventually, TV staffers Francine (Gaylen Ross) and Stephen (Dave Emge) flee their station. Meanwhile, two S.W.A.T. cops, Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger), survive a horrific raid on a zombie-infested apartment building and join the TV staffers to escape Philadelphia by helicopter. The foursome selects an abandoned shopping mall as a potential fortress, realizing they can barricade the doors, kill the zombies already inside, and then help themselves to abundant supplies.

          The choice of the mall as the film’s principal location is the genius contrivance of this movie, a satirical flourish that separates Dawn of the Dead from lesser gorefests. In trying to explain why zombies flock to the mall, the heroes surmise that the urge to shop is so ingrained in the American character that even death can’t suppress the consumerist call. Furthermore, the heroes go on several “shopping sprees,” usually punctuated with zombie kills, putting a dark spin on the American dream of unfettered materialism. Even the nasty plot twist Romero introduces late in the movie—a gang of vicious bikers invades the mall—feeds into his cruel lampooning of modern-day excesses.

          Speaking of excess, Dawn of the Dead achieved instant infamy during its original release not just for Romero’s ingenious storyline, but also for the outrageous gore that permeates the movie. Makeup man Tom Savini (who also appears onscreen as the leader of the bikers) contrived realistic simulations of beheadings, disembowelments, dismemberments, gunshots, knife wounds, and even exploding heads, filling the screen with enough viscera to nauseate a butcher. Some fans love this stuff because it’s so over the top, but for those not indoctrinated into the cult of bloody movies, Dawn of the Dead is rough going. (To avoid an X rating, Romero released the movie unrated in the U.S.)

          Adding another interesting wrinkle to Dawn of the Dead is the participation of Italian horror-cinema madman Dario Argento, who served as a creative consultant and also provided the film’s twinkly electronic music. As part of his deal, Argento got to re-edit and rename the movie for international release, so his version—much shorter than Romero’s—is called Zombi. In fact, multiple versions of Dawn of the Dead exist, with the longest sprawling across three hours.

          In any event, Dawn of the Dead was a box-office success, so Romero continued his zombie cycle with Day of the Dead (1985) and other sequels. However, Romero’s pictures should not be confused with the spoof Return of the Living Dead (1985) or its sequel, Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988); similarly, 1990’s Night of the Living Dead is merely a remake of the original picture. To make things even more confusing, Dawn of the Dead was remade by director Zack Snyder in 2004, and a sequel to the remake is reportedly in the works—even though Romero is still making follow-ups to the 1978 movie.

Dawn of the Dead: GROOVY