Martin (John Amplas), a young man who looks around 20-years-old, boards a train in Indianapolis, Indiana for New York. At night, he breaks into a sleeping car and sedates a woman with a syringe full of narcotics. She struggles, but he tells her not to struggle or be upset because she wont feel pain. After a few minutes, the woman falls asleep, and Martin has sex with the unconscious woman. Afterwards, he slices her wrists with a razor blade so he can drink her blood. The woman bleeds to death in her sleep.
In the morning, the train stops in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where Martin disembarks. He is met by Tata Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) an elderly and hostile old man who claims to be his cousin from the Old World. Together, they travel by another train to the town of Braddock, a dying industrial suburb. They walk to Cuda's large house where he shows Martin his living quarters. Cuda then accuses Martin of being an 84-year-old vampire from his old country. He has taken in Martin because he is family, but tells him, "First I will save your soul. Then I shall destroy you." Martin denies being a vampire and implies that Cuda is merely his uncle rather than his cousin. Cuda then puts up strings of garlic on the doors to his and his granddaughter's room, and then holds up a small cross when Martin approaches him. Martin takes away the cross, and even takes a bite of the garlic mocking these attempts by saying bitterly, "There's no real magic... ever". Cuda tells Martin that he can come and go as he pleases. But he also warns Martin that he will kill him if he kills anyone in Braddock. He also tells Martin to stay away from his granddaughter Christine (Christine Forrest), whom arrives home from her job that evening.
Cuda introduces Christine to Martin, but also warns her to stay away from him. But Christine instead strikes up a friendship with Martin who confides in her about his vampire heritage. When Cuda later confirms Martin's claims to be a vampire, Christine, not surprisingly, refuses to believe either one. She thinks that Cuda and the other members of her family have driven Martin to insanity by making him think that he is a vampire. It is never revealed if Martin really is a vampire, or just a shy and lonely youth with troubled issues. Christine is the only person that Martin gets the courage to talk to. When Christine's boyfriend Arthur (Tom Savini) arrives at the house for dinner, Martin stops talking and backs away despite Arthur's attempt at a conversation. Christine later confides in Martin that she hopes to leave Braddock someday with Arthur, even though Martin points out that Arthur treats her badly and is both verbally and physically abusive towards her.
When Christine sees that Martin won't talk to anyone else, she buys him a phone which he installs in his room. Martin begins to repeatingly call a radio talk show where he describes what it's like to be a vampire. He becomes known on the radio as "the Count" to all the listeners. But the patronizing host (Michael Gornick) thinks he's just crazy.
Martin gets a job at Cuda's grocery store of stocking shelves, hauling boxes around, and even gets to be a delivery boy for some of the customers. One of his customers is a certain Abby Santini (Elyane Nadeau), who becomes taken in with Martin. She is a very friendly young woman who is depressed when she tells Martin that her husband is unfaithful. But Martin still does not have the nerve to talk with her, so she is happy to have someone to confide in with her life problems. Martin phones the radio show host to describe his infatuation with the housewife and senses that she wants to have sex with him. When the radio show host asks Martin if it is a sexual problem that he has involving women criticizing him during sex, Martin replies that he has never had sex with a woman who was awake.
One day, Martin travels by train to outside Braddock to look for victims. At a supermarket, he follows a young woman (Sarah Venable) home to her posh suburban house. He sees the woman's husband (Richard Rubenstein) leave for a long business trip, and Martin decides this would be the right time for more feeding. Martin returns to the house after dark and breaks in through the garage door. But it is Martin who gets the surprise when he bursts into her bedroom to find her in bed with her adulterous lover Lewis (Al Levitsky). After a vicious struggle, Martin jabs both of them with hyprodermic needles with narcotics, and waits for the drugs to take affect. He drags the unconscious body of Lewis from the house to a clump of trees across the street where he kills him by shoving a broken tree branch into his neck and drinks his blood. Martin returns to the house where he has sex with the unconscious woman. But out of compassion and pity, he decides to let her live.
Martin begins to have romantic monochrome visions of his vampire past (real or imagined), where he drained blood from a young woman and was chased through the streets of a nameless European town by a torch-lit mob.
During one Sunday at church, Cuda brings home Father Howard (George A. Romero) who asks him about the possibility of exorcism and demon possession. Father Howard calls upon the elderly Father Zulemans (Clifford Forrest, Jr.) over at Cuda's request. Together, Cuda and Zulemans confront Martin his bedroom and attempt to perform an exorcism on him. At this point, Martin remembers (another real or imaginary flashback), in the Old Country of people trying to perform an exorcism on him, and he flees them. Martin then flees from Cuda and Zuelmas as well. A little later that night, Martin terrorizes Cuda in a children's playground when he puts on a Dracula cape and puts false fangs into his mouth to pretend that he really is a vampire.
One day, Martin finally musters the courage to talk with Mrs. Santini during a routine delivery to her house where he tells her that he's aware of her attempts to seduce him and wants now to have sex with her. After having sex for the first time, Mrs. Santini becomes more depressed for she tells Martin that her husband just left her because she discovered that she cannot bear children, and that her desires towards him are based on sex and nothing else. But Martin wants to stay with her and help her move on with her life. Martin tells the radio show host about his affair with the housewife and that he no longer has the urge to attack other women.
Meanwhile, Arthur meets with Cuda and tells him that he wants Christine to leave town with him so they can get married and start a family. But Christine becomes angry at Cuda when he tells Arthur that insanity runs in their family and he shouldn't consider having children with her. Shortly afterwards, Christine packs up and leaves Braddock for New York with Arthur despite Martin telling her that Arthur is abusive towards her. But her mind is made up. Before leaving, Christine tells Martin that she really has no ill feelings towards him and just wants to make a fresh start with her life. She says goodbye to him and promises to write. But Martin knows that with an abusive and possessive man in Christine's life, she probably won't.
Depressed over losing his one true friend, Martin phones the radio show host and tells him that he's getting "shaky" and wants to go out looking for more victims. That night, Martin travels to a rough crime-ridden area of Pittsburgh and attacks two derelicts in a alley, injecting them with narcotics. He kills one of them by silting the bum's wrist and drinking his blood. Martin is about to kill the second one when a police car shows up and gives chase. Martin narrowly escapes during a long chase on foot which leads from the garbage strew streets and through a local store. Martin runs into an old warehouse where a drug deal is going down. A shootout between the two cops and the three thugs begins where all of them are killed, leaving Martin as the sole survivor who casually walks away from the carnage.
One day, Martin finds Mrs. Santini dead in her bathtub, after she had slit her writs with a razor blade. Martin anonymously calls the police to report the body and leaves. He phones the radio show host one final time to say that he really doesn't need friends or people to talk to for he is his own person. But when Cuda learns about Mrs. Santini's suicide, is mistakenly thinks Martin killed her and made it look like a suicide as he's done before. Cuda walks into Martin's room while he is asleep and kills him by hammering a wooden stake through Martin's heart.
Cuda buries Martin's body in his back garden, while over the closing credits various voices from people are heard talking to the radio show host asking the whereabouts of "the Count".
气氛渲染、大杀阵场面调度，甚至连暴力场面都可以反复欣赏，我最喜欢的一场戏居然就是刺杀芹泽鸭，镜头语言绝佳。
很佩服导演和制作团队竟然能把残酷的战争拍得如此唯美而独具艺术感，一种全新的尝试，个人觉得十分值得借鉴和推敲。
这电影对观众是有门槛的，你必须在原田真人标志性的快速剪辑和海量的插入镜头中获得动人的细节，不然就只能感受到流水账一样的节奏。而且这也并非是群像剧，主角只有土方岁三，他也确实是新选组中最值得讲的人物。至少他立起来了。就是原田真人这样的手法去拍历史剧合不合适，就，有待商榷吧。最后，原田真人的快速剪辑看的真爽啊。
看的真的累，剧情上过于平了，起伏都过小刚起就死刚起就死。但视觉上还挺有意思的主黑白适当的彩色和红色渲染着氛围，强大的分镜和摄影。
好爱这部
原来是这样的土方副长，是这样始终贯彻自己心中的武士道精神、热血又有点悲凉的新选组…冲田总司最后望向窗外那里让我忍不住想起了“物哀之美”，想起了七寻记里溅起樱花花瓣的加贺清光…山田凉介演得不错，演活了那种纯净温柔的少年气。
铃木亮平拍完西乡殿就来燃剑了，倒幕挺幕无缝切换😅 等了两年终于看到了，嗯，就很流水账，池田屋还算是仔细描写了，后面真是高潮还没起来就到下一段事件去了，看完总觉得还缺了点什么。
还没有哪一部战争片让我有这么新奇的体验，诗意与现实并存，突出战争的残酷，让“浙西南革命精神”可以很好地走进观众内心。
非常独特的“学院派”，画面很有苏派的那种纪实感，叙事上有杂糅了一些新浪潮的风格。很多空镜和蒙太奇的运用又颇有中古山水禅意在其中，最后的血雨很有反战行为艺术的调调。挺新鲜。
阴柔 唯美 克制
一个烂的没救的本子和一些努力在拯救本子的好演员。土方牌摄影机和一堆在仓促的剧情里来不及认是谁的人。打开燃剑之前我真的没想到世界上有人能把池田屋到五棱郭压缩进一个小时。角色吧也没足够的背景剧情支起来，剧情吧连个合格的流水账都不算。原田监督很会拍人，但别自己做编剧了谢谢。
对新选组这种大家都很熟悉的故事改编必须突出重点 这部片子没做到 导致大量历史人物只能走个过场
在优秀的长镜头下看到了浙西南的美景，也看到了浙西南革命精神的兴起和传承。
在真正的战争历史中，不仅有那些人人称道的大英雄，还有很多很多像影片中这样的无名英雄，他们也值得被我们永久铭记。
“人类总有些部分，即便身经百战也不会改变，所以我们才能走到今天。”
全程暗灰调画面让人看得脸盲，人物的脸都看不清楚，加上全部对话都是方言，还要全程看字幕，越看越火大。
独特的战争片切入视角让人眼前一亮，对于战争残酷的记忆也因此更为深刻。
电影落下帷幕的瞬间惊觉时间竟已经过去那么久了嘛，不是九十分钟而是八十多年…
喜欢看这种全片只有方言的电影，给人一种很亲切又很真实的感觉，历史厚重感也随之而来，革命信仰也更加浓烈。
这是我看过的最“美”的战争片，江山壮丽如泼墨，革命精神如烈火！
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