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".
全世界都看得到。
依然是密集的对白，超多信息量，关键是把故事还讲得挺精彩就很牛皮了。不过故事本身就很不错～
“93小时，但好像一辈子了。”
3.5，结构能联想到《十二宫》，索金显然从芬奇那里学到了很多。影像上营造的表现力显然高于事件本身，雕刻痕迹也更重。
发现我还是很吃索金的！灯塔坚持住啊别倒！！
没想到这种密集对白的戏码竟然比特效大片更过瘾刺激，热血沸腾，在唇枪舌剑中穿插还原事件，这种高能的对白和剪辑我之前只在社交网络和乔布斯里见过，居然都是同一个人的剧作，艾伦索金，记住这个大佬了。
如果说在这个背离真实的年代，有何可称之为良心的话，我想那只能是过去的发生过的良心——也即这部电影里重述的故事。
电影充分表达了现实的可悲，反战又如何，老话说的好“狗改不了吃屎”，表面光鲜正确的蒙太奇下，现实是如此地无力呢！
最近无意中连看了几场法庭辩论类的电影，只有这一部看的人热血沸腾，而且是在其余故事线极为淡薄的情况下，把法庭戏份拍得如此精彩。末尾让我想起了《辩护人》的感觉，但是是不同的处理，这里的诠释正如最后一句台词：全世界都在看着！是一种强烈的共鸣感。
“在这个国家，我们每四年都这么做”
精彩紧凑，1.25倍速就会跟不上只能一秒一秒看的程度。差得那点是无处不在的价值观，不反感但很有压力，各种意义上的irony让我很崩溃，一边看一边OS i really dun know……一方面我感叹他们至少拥有这样滑天下之大稽的机会，另一方面我否认历史可完全复制。很难不流泪，但我想这激烈情绪来自矛盾和反省，而非the whole world is watching的从众心。电影只是表面故事，历史却如滔滔洪流，再做一万次选择，倚仗的也只有但求无愧于心而已。
而当记者提问的时候 嬉皮士的信念毫不嬉皮
有笑料，有讽刺，混乱又有条理，法庭上还有很亮眼的台词。本来给个四星，不过冲着国内想拍也拍不出来，特意给五星。
并不存在完美的制度，还需要人心和思想来将它维持在一个可持续的状态，而凝结于全体社会中的心性与观念就是传统习俗和价值取向。当然，当一个制度光从逻辑推理上看就存在很多的漏洞，就别指望更高层次的那些了。WYT
索金的话唠电影，政治倾向鲜明，好莱坞标准产品，因为太标准，所以总是不错看的，剧本，剪辑，群戏，法庭戏都在合格标准以上，当科普也是不错的，政治宣言本身~~~咱啥都不懂，啥都不说。
熟悉的快剪辑风格，最后的庭审戏还是挺燃的。
“Do you have contempt for your government? (你是否蔑视你的政府)” - "It's nothing compared to the contempt my government has for me.(与我的政府对我的蔑视相比, 我的蔑视不值一提)” | 这个时间点上映真是太应景了，整个2020魔幻一年啊，如果当选最佳是不是也太表明奥斯卡态度了？虽然感觉奥斯卡也没在怕的。最后一幕太鸡血其实有点莫名。
1.小兰回复了新一在伦敦的告白，两人正式开始交往。
三星半 比预期好 开场很喜欢 导演功力比上次有进步 也可能因为庭审戏更适合索金式的快速对白 但人物并没有太立起来
the whole world is watching……
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