"Martin" (1977) d/ George A. Romero

One of my favorite modern vampire movies, hands down. For anyone interested in seeing George A. at his most powerful and effective as a filmmaker, they should probably cue tonight's review up first. Boasting of an outstanding script full of tumult and irony strengthened by top shelf performances by a cast led by Romero regular, John Amplas, who really shows his formidable dramatic reach here, and solid support from Christine Forrest (who would later become Mrs. Romero) as his symapathetic cousin and Lincoln Maazel as his hardline uncle, Martin would also mark the very first collaboration between George and sovereign Splatter King Tom Savini, whose gore has never looked more wicked, adding to the already gritty authenticity of the low budgeted film's western Pennsylvania locations. Every shot is meticulously framed throughout the brisk ninety-five minute running time , edited down from the original lost two hour and forty-five minute print, entirely in black and white. And just when I think the film can't get any better, there's the final reel...

If the real thing don't do the trick, Martin (John Amplas) better make up something quick, gonna burn into the wick, awwww, Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel)! 
On an overnight train, we meet Martin (Amplas) as he subdues a young woman with a syringe full of sedatives,before opening her wrists with a razor blade, and feasting upon her lifeblood until she's dead. Martin is convinced he's a vampire that is dependent on the red stuff for sustenance, and his old school Lithuanian uncle, Barracud- uhh, err... Tateh Cuda (Maazel), who's awaiting his arrival at the train platform in Pittsburgh, is convinced he is, too. So much so, in fact, that he sets bell traps and hangs garlic all over the homestead where Martin will be residing, forbidding him any discourse with his cousin Christina (Forrest) and warning him that if he preys upon any Braddock residents, he'll go Peter Cushing on his ass and drive a stake through his heart. He teases the superstitious old man's safeguards against him with a cape and phony plastic fangs, telling him: "There's no real magic...ever." A man of his convictions, Cuda still isn't buying it.


"Don't kill yourself, baby, I got you the Leif Garrett tickets afterall..."
Martin gets a job delivering groceries from Cuda's butcher shop and develops a friendship with a frustrated  customer named Mrs. Santini (Elayne Nadeau) after she unsuccessfully tries to seduce him. His bloodlust eventually bests him in the end, and he travels to the city in search of new victims. After stalking a woman at the supermarket that he believes to be alone, he breaks in to discover she's entertaining a lover in bed, and is forced to drug the adulterous couple; feeding on the man, and raping the woman while she's unconscious before slipping away undetected. This leads to Martin phoning in to a local talk radio DJ as 'The Count' and confessing his crimes to the glee of the show's listeners. Trying to resist his psychological blood urge, he enters into a physical relationship with Santini, but another Pittsburgh hunt turns sour when he targets a couple of stumblebums, narrowly escaping the law, by ducking into a drug shack. Back home, Christina moves in with her boyfriend (Savini!) when Cuda's persistent harassment of Martin with crucifixes and prayers become too much for her to bear. Meanwhile, Martin visits his lover only to discover she has committed suicide by slashing her wrists with a razor in the bathtub. Cuda assumes that his nephew is responsible, and pounds a wooden stake into the sleeping man's heart, burying him in the backyard afterwards, where we finally see him, tending the garden as the credits roll to the sounds of radio listeners calling into the station, curious as to whatever happened to 'The Count'...


"I missed an episode of 'Baggy Pants and The Nitwits' and there's no point in going on now."
Fans of 80's synth pop duo, Soft Cell, will remember the group's tribute to this one on their 1983 Art of Falling Apart release. Next up for Romero would be 1978's legendary Dawn of the Dead, where Amplas, the film's casting director, would get shot off a rooftop as a Puerto Rican ("Jesus Christ! There's a thousand pigs!") in the memorable opening sequence, also playing a biker and zombie along the way. He'd later work in Romero's Knightriders (1979), Creepshow(1982), and Day of the Dead (1985), as well as Bloodeaters (1980) and John Russo's Midnight (1981). On the scale, four beedubs oughta cover the undeniable magnificence of tonight's review, one that comes with my highest recommendation. A true genre classic.


Eating Stake-Him's for breakfast can really exact a toll on one's heart.

"Day of the Dead"(1985)d/George A. Romero

I have to admit that I'm a little perplexed at the fact that we've never covered tonight's review here at the Wop, remembering how thoroughly amped I was the first time I caught it, with a couple of buddies in my old man's '79 Impala on a double-bill with C.H.U.D.(1984) at the legendary West Side Drive-In that night in 1985.Having been a hardcore Romero-ite for something like eight years up to that point, I was salivating like Pavlov's dog at the concept of a wrap to his wildly successful zombie trilogy(remember when it was merely a 'trilogy', folks?), and thus, denying Chevy-entry to any backseat-inclined brawds that might have had amorous designs on this momentous event.They'd have to wait patiently for a less pivotal double feature, like Gremlins/Ghoulies the following weekend(keep your eyes peeled for that particular ripper of a yarn in future posts), if they expected to get busted out by the kid himself, on the spacious bucket seats of his father's schooner-on-wheels.Gore guru Tom Savini provides the finger-chompin', gut-splayin', Saturn Award-winning splatter effects(his first coming on 'DOTD') that splash across the screen in bloody spurts between Romero's ambitiously scripted mouth offs and philosophical whimsy that make up the film's dialogue, in attempt to shed some light on communication breakdown and the ensuing anarchy born out of it, perhaps.Forced to scale back his original epic vision when the budget was bissected to three and a half million from seven, Romero's Day also faced a limited theatrical run in the States and opened to mixed reviews before grossing nearly thirty million dollars on the international market and earning lucrative bank in video sales across the globe since.Make no mistakes, this is classic horror we're looking upon...

"Whoa! Shouldn'ta dropped both those blotters before lunch..."
Sarah(Lori Cardille) awakens from a nightmare in the day of the dead, as the only female in a subterranean enclave of scientists and military hopelessly surrounded on all sides by ravenous zombies in the Everglades as they desperately race towards a cure for the zombification process and search the east coast for any potential survivors in a helicopter, as helmed by John(Terry Alexander), a self-centered patois-spitting pilot and his partner, McDermott, a brandy-swilling radio expert.Also along for the ride is Sarah's romantic interest, Miguel(Tony DiLeo, Jr.), a girly soldier in the throes of a mental breakdown.Touching down in Ft Meyers only turns up a shambling army of the undead, and a perturbed alligator.Underground, things aren't much sexier, as Major Cooper has just passed on, leaving the impatient skeptic Rhodes(Joe Pilato) in charge of the operation, which is rapidly dissolving into insults and threats when the head scientist, Dr. Logan(Richard Liberty), whom they affectionately refer to as "Frankenstein", fails to show any discernible progress in his experiments with zombie subjects, haphazardly rounded up on a regular basis by Rhodes' men from the surrounding mines.Sarah holds faith that a cure or reversal of the zombification process can be discovered, while Logan sees learned behavior modification for the pus-fucks as the only feasible option, with his star pupil being a zombie named Bub(Sherman Howard), who displays excellent manners for Frankenstein's company, indeed.The reanimated corpse clumsily shaves his dead skin with a razor, goes through the motions of reading a copy of Stephen King Salem's Lot, and even salutes Rhodes, who's disgusted by the whole display, to say the least.

...and a special cameo appearance by Mickey Roarke.
The problem is, Frankenstein's been secretly rewarding Bub's good behavior with a bucketful of soldier meat-treats, which earns him a short, controlled machine gun burst to the belly and a trip to meet his maker.Miguel gets himself bitten on the arm during one round up, managing to get one of Rhodes' men's throats torn out in the process, but Sarah quickly amputates the infected arm, cauterizing the stump with a torch, as Rhodes and co. make the scene at John and McDermott's place just outside the complex, demanding revenge for the increasing number of dead comrades, and resulting in an intense standoff between all parties involved.In the melee Rhodes wastes Fisher(John Amplas) and locks McDermott and Sarah inside one of the zombie corrals, demanding that John flies he and his soldiers off to safety, while an unhinged Miguel sneaks off to let all the zombies surrounding the complex in, getting dined on for his troubles.Meanwhile, Bub has broken free of his restraints, and shambled upon Logan's dead body, causing the ghoul to groan out loud in a burst of emotion, before picking up a gun and setting off on a course of...revenge?John manages to snag a pair of six guns in knocking Rhodes and one of his men unconscious, and he makes off into the darkened mine passages to search for Sarah and McDermott.Quickly trapped by approaching zombies, Rhodes sells his men out while trying to escape himself, and they're rended limb from limb by the rotting hordes, while the commander's path is blocked by a bitter Bub who shows some serious marksmanship for a dead guy in plugging Rhodes with several rounds before he's set upon by the horde who tear him apart."Choke on 'em!" he spits, watching as his innards are pulled out by the hungry ghouls.After Sarah has a repeat nightmare in the race to the chopper, she awakens on a beach where John and his soused buddy are relaxedly fishing from the shore.She crosses another date off on a makeshift calendar...

"Hold still!Do you want that eyelash outta there or not?!!?"
Look for fellow FX men Taso Stavrakis and Greg Nicotero among the military ranks here, both suffering fittingly horrible on-camera deaths at the hands of their pal, Savini, here.What keeps Day outta the running for the title of Romero's apex zombie opus, for me, is the number of irksome personalities amongst the survivors, especially Miguel, and to a lesser degree, the fake Jamaican, John and his comical dipsomaniacal pal, McDermott.Lengthy discourse from the characters as the story progresses doesn't gain them any advocate in me, I'm patiently waiting for the effeminate hispanic to get chowed upon by zombies by the time Dr. Tongue famously shambles in front of Romero's lens in the opening credits, and bummed knowing that the other two make it okay in the end.Don't get me wrong, I highly dug the characters of Sarah, Logan, Fisher, and Rhodes, especially, it was just a strange experience hating on any of George's roles, a first, really, as much as I ended up doing over the years and repeated viewings.And as much personality and realism the zombies and gore effects here exude, I think Day still could have used more of both in the end for that final boost into legend.Still, it remains one of my favorite zombie movies of the era, with much nostalgia enshrouding it's every aspect for me, and for that, it earns a well-deserved three Wop score on the scale; a must-see for every horror fan.

Rhodes(Joe Pilato) gets treated like the Minnesota Vikings did, on any given Sunday last season.

"Midnight"(1982)d/John Russo

I'm willing to forgive NOTLD co-writer John Russo for the folly of much of his cinematic output since his famous collaboration with George A., with special emphasis on his mordacious handling of the so-called 30th Anniversary recut, rescored, (retarded) re-imagining of the b&w Romero zombie classic.Instead, tonight we'll take a look the 1982 film version of his novel, first published in 1980, a mostly uncoordinated, slow moving, minor effort, with occasional moments of eerie backwoods atmosphere and amateur splatter.Working with a skeleton crew, light-damaged cheapo film stock, and mostly unreliable amateur actors, while the cut-happy MPAA censors neutered his horrific theological vision, Russo still manages to insert some quality unease into his directorial debut, sort of a TCM meets Deranged vibe going on here.Until the advent of dvds, most of Midnight's juicy bits ended up on the cutting room floor, with the craptastic Vidmark VHS release from the early eighties still stale on my mind, though Arrow's transfer looks to be an equally murky dub from weathered video source materials(as evidenced by the time coding at the top of some of my screenshots, eh).Apart from Lawrence Tierney and John Amplas, the cast, garbed in what looks like a  J.C. Penny's sidewalk sale run on 1978 backstocked polyester and denim, is mostly forgettable, though antagonists David Marchick, Greg Besnak, and Robin Walsh run the gamut from gleefully sadistic to stiltedly comical as the family of hayseed Satanists.Melanie Verlin as the female lead is neither effective nor particularly swell to look at, for that matter.The headache-inducing AM Gold-esque synth score that perfectly accentuates the disco wear and shag carpeted van interiors within, if you see where I'm goin' here. Russo delights in padding out already snore-worthy driving and walking sequences throughout the movie, still, there's that foreboding dread, sporadic as it may be, that rises out of his frame that's rare for slashers of the era.You could do a lot worse than a movie like this on a Wednesday night, I guess.

Five words no girl ever wants to hear: "Come to Lawrence Tierney, baby..."
We see what looks to be Jimmy Peterson's little sister screaming her fool head off while snagged in an animal trap, before Momma(Jackie Nicoll)  can convince her brood that the terrified girl is really a demon in disguise, and in desperate need of a hearty clobberin' with an axe handle.Back at the farmhouse, we see the girl sacrificed to the dark lord and master with a single plunge of a sizeable dagger, as wielded by Cynthia(Debra Smith) .Over the credits, it gets even more diabolical, as Nancy Johnson(Melanie Verlin) gives a juicy confession(she's committed sins o' th' flaish with her boyfriend...wait, chicks that looked like the leisure version of Prince Valiant got laid in the early eighties? It can't be.) and is told she oughta be burning in Hell for sharing her cunt before marriage the way she's done, by cracky!At home, it might even be worse for the old looking teen, who's drunkenly ogled and groped by her own stepdad(Lawrence Tierney) before braining him with a transistor radio(!) and thumbing her way outta town before he comes to, and she has to hear him say, "Why don't ya just relax and let Daddy make ya feel good?" again.To strains of easy listening AM radio'd be too embarrassed to play, Nancy hops in a shagged out delivery van on it's way to Fla, as piloted by a checkered pair of squares, Tom and Hank, and together, they embark on a corny driving montage complete with racial tensions in a saloon, and a black preacher at a gas station who's barely able to spit out some exposition about missing locals, gas cans, and anti-black sentiment in the area before a yokel can bark at him.The priest gets knifed up in a nearby graveyard and his daughter gets C.T.F.O.ed in the tub by a snickering mountain of a good ol' boy while our heroes steal groceries, netting them anti-climactic cop chase that lands them directly in the center of fucking nowhere.Meanwhile, back home, Nancy's stepdad breaks it to Mom that she's been showing off her little body to him whenever she gets the chance, and he's kept it from her out of love.Larry Tierney a sex magnet?Now I've seen it all...

If you give tonsilectomies with a rusty machete in a rundown farmhouse, you might be a redneck.
Our gang awakens from their camping overnighter with gun barrels in their faces the next morning, courtesy of Abraham(John Amplas) and Luke(Greg Besnak), dressed as cops.Hank, cuffed, makes a break for it, and pays with a point blank execution headshot from Abe, who later plugs Tom in the heart, savin' taxpayers money an' all.The trigger-happy badges chase Nancy through the woods to a farmhouse where Cynthia(Robin Walsh) deals Solitaire while her brother Cyrus(David Marchick) gigglingly saws off a victim's head with a machete.Why, these are the same evil brats from the pre-credit sequence, all grown up and twice as psychotic.I see what you did there.The siblings squabble about having three sacrifices to Satan for Easter(I was unaware Satan even celebrated beyond your obligatory basket full of chocolate bunnies and eggs like the rest of us) while Nancy gets cozy in a dog cage, next to Gwen, another kenneled up cutie for the festivities.The boys burn the burgeoning pile of bodies and snatch another shapely young victim while Luke shanks up her husband in a nearby woodpile, following up on the promise he'd made earlier to his mother's mummified corpse in the attic.The first girl gets herself an extra mouth during the pentagram-heavy ceremony,  her blood caught in a chalice and fed to the siblings' mother's rotting cadaver while Nancy quietly gives an act of contrition from her cage.While the boys make Tom's van disappear, they're spotted by Burt, Nancy's stepdad, who's on the case like Kojak, if Kojak was an uglier, heavier drunk who fancied molesting his own stepdaughter, that is.Burt flashlights the shit outta Luke's domepiece and holds Cyrus and Abe at gunpoint, demanding they return his blow up do-uhhh, daughter, to him.In the melee, Cynthia jabs Burt with her dagger, Burt shoots Cyrus in the head, Nancy scythes Cynthia's throat, and later sets a resurrected Luke ablaze with a gas can and a match in the barn.Abe is dead somewhere too, I think.Cue that rotten title track one last time, thankfully, and let's recoup our losses already.

With her hair and makeup done, Mama was finally ready for the family photo at Sears.
Russo would follow tonight's review up with things like Midnight 2: Sex, Death and Videotape(1993), the direct-to-video sequel, Scream Queens' Naked Christmas(1996), and Santa Claws(1996), while chisel-faced Brooklyn tough guy Lawrence Tierney would  appear in genre offerings like 1987's The Offspring, The Prowler(1981), Chris Gore's Red(1992), The Horror Show(1989), and even that Tarantino cat's own debut, Reservoir Dogs(1992), as Joe 'Mr. Big' Cabot.Juicy.Real juicy, Junior.John Amplas, an always likable  Romero regular and favorite of mine, starred in Martin(1976), got shot off a rooftop in Dawn of the Dead(1978), played a mime in Knightriders(1981), rose from the grave in Creepshow(1982), and donned a lab coat in Day of the Dead(1985).While we're on the subject, Verlin would turn up in Romero's Monkey Shines(1988).Savini would stay busy throughout the decade, lending his effects wizardry to productions like Friday the 13th:The Final Chapter(1984), Creepshow 2(1987), and the 1990 Argento/Romero film, Due occhi diabolici, while appearing in direct-to-video titles like United's The Ripper(1985), which we'll be taking a gander at in the days to come.Despite Savini's credit for providing makeups and effects for tonight's feature, in the Arrow dvd featurette, "“Midnight at your Door: The Shocking Sacrifices of John A. Russo”, we hear the writer/director admit to fabricating much of the film's stabbing/slashing effects himself, even taking a potshot at Savini for his work on the mummified corpse in the finale.Also noteworthy, is Bill Hinzman, NOTLD's legendary 'Cemetery Zombie', who provided still photography for the movie.A technical dud, but worth a look, regardless.One Wop.

Nancy(Melanie Verlin)'s refusal to go on the paper lands her in the 'Punishment Kennel'.