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".
无论是遥远的复辟王朝还是当下的新世纪
明明是两个世纪以前的故事，但搬到现在核心却一点也不过时。只能说技术在向前飞速发展，而人类却一直在原地踏步（一些国家甚至在开历史倒车...🤨
历史不过在周而复始
巴尔扎克的原著很扎实，改编得也很成功，复辟时期巴黎社会众生相，去年能战胜其他众多强片获得凯撒奖当之无愧。
幻灭了…perla的字幕机太暗了太暗了我要瞎了ಥ_ಥ
6.0/10 分。初看，蓝光。整体普普通通。演员们演技没有任何问题，但这个西部片的剧情放今天真的是太“老”了。枪战剪辑得也是挺一般的，比如门口开枪那一段，七八个人没打中老头，简直是对西部劫匪们的侮辱。。。可能是美国佬对于“比利小子”的情怀吧，IMDb上也有7.2分。个人真的无爱。
表演一般，旁白来凑，表演最好的可能是报社那只猴子🐵，看到几百年前巴黎的媒体社会政治乱象挺有意思。德不配才自然不配财，终究镜花水月一场空。
没想到19世纪的出版业就这么腥风血雨了——谁给的钱多就为谁说话。还看出了贵族和自由派在时代背景下的针锋相对。为了一个虚幻的title而迷失自我的男主，更是令人唏嘘不已。没看过原著但是感觉群像描述得不错，每个角色的性格都很鲜明，感觉巴尔扎克的作品放到现代背景下也不过时。
标准的年代剧罢了。旁白是偷懒，男主空有皮囊。可以看看隔壁的Fabian。
＃Venezia78＃展映 还好，原来是Billy Boy的续集。特别喜欢电影能保持冷静克制的镜头，枪战也迅速果断。虽看得出时代对西部片赋予了新的意义，也是西部片慢慢消逝的象征。然后儿子角色塑造不成功。
這拍得也太依賴畫外音了。男主演老是歪著嘴笑看著不太聰明。
恺撒奖难道是看在巴尔扎克的面子上哪？虽然变小了巴黎的浮华虚伪勾心斗角，但是故事本身虽然抽离了吕西安的主线然而还是缺乏小说的故事魅力。旁白音也太多了
扎实的名著电影，布景服化道一看就很贵很还原，巴尔扎克的小说毕竟戏剧性极高，看起来毫不无聊；是文学梦的幻灭，爱情的幻灭，也是妄图实现阶级跃层的幻灭，时至今日，类似的故事仍然不断上演，至少男主功成名就过，大多人被淹没在大城市的纸醉金迷里，水花都不曾溅起；内森居然是多兰演的！看演员表才发现，卷发单薄帅哥都免不了发腮嘛难道，多兰你之前可是比本片男主帅的多啊。
乡村小子怀揣着自大的文学抱负逆袭失败，小丑一样的在贵族圈走了一遭，最后带着失败回到乡下
巴黎的新闻业√美则美矣，太过于冗长，沉浸感不够！
剧作干净的没有一点多余的水分 即使很早猜到结局也会很耐心的看下去 节奏和视听语言都很不错
小民喜好的就是谣言，造谣的媒体自然成为社会焦点。连捧带杀，多家媒体火力并开，谁又会想到这仅仅是为了制造热点，收割韮菜。男主有幸经历这一切，即便幻灭，平生亦足矣。
中规中矩吧，小说原著里那些枝节但很重要的剧情与人物都砍掉了，故事变得紧凑，但这样一个巴黎梦碎的故事也挺普通的。
放在当年，这部戏剧肯定很有洞见，但在今天，两个半小时很难熬。
可以想象原著的精彩。青年被时代裹挟的故事不要太多。巴黎的浮华世界大概就是他的一场黄粱梦吧。一流的小说并不是最适合改编的，感觉编剧导演有点束手束脚，但是整体还是很有水准：精致的服化道，丰富的配乐，演员的表演。
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