Graveyard Shift (1987)

"You don't look so well...maybe you need a good, stiff drink."

And of course, the vamp obliges.

Video director is dying, meets a hunky centuries-old vampire cabbie, and falls in love with him. Their relationship is the focal point of this movie, how this causes friction with her philandering husband (who has been humping the star of his wife's failed gothic video). Meanwhile, the cabbie's been spreading the love to other women in the city, his favorite targets, the doomed and dying. They, in turn, attack men, promising sex, using blades, slicing throats, and taking from them blood.
The rest is all blood and tits, lots of the hunk cocking his head back, letting those fangs protrude, and thrusts forward for the next bite. Oh, his particular place to feast is just right above his victims' breasts. Like we have seen in Dracula, if without his source of youth, absent feeding for very long he slowly dies, showing his real age in several scenes, chalk gray hair and palid skin.

There are lots of women featured in this film exposing their breasts either for their master or to draw men into their web. The director loves shooting up close breasts (sometimes with erect nipples) as blood trickles down them, and the star of the film, Michael A Miranda, gets plenty of time to spend with his shirt open or buck naked giving the ladies a good look at his muscular physique. He likes to walk around nude when feeding from some of his popular girls (he continues to drink from his vamps when the need to feed is too great to resist), often questioning their judgment in butchering men, leaving so many bodies for investigators to study. He is fatalistic, hoping that his girls will slip up so he can eventually be caught and killed. He can't just kill himself, because even though he wants to die, the body doesn't. The craving interferes with the yearning for the exhaustion of centuries to cease. Helen Papas is the dying video director whose career, at first promising, is put on hold by producers not willing to continue funding and ultimately over when the news of impending demise is perhaps only a month away without treatment. Both these sad souls have a serious, erotic, and passionate romance that encompasses most of the movie, with occasional shifts to the cops investigating and the vamp girls slaying.

We always, a definite constant of the director's visual style, get plenty of the city streets steaming with the cool of the night often seen leaving the lips of those featured in the movie. Street lights casting a glow through windows, park trees, behind characters, really emphasizing the graveyard shift of the title, how the feeding takes place during the moonlight hours when many are asleep peacefully in their beds as the night owls, populating the strip clubs and streetwalker alleys and corners, look for a good time, perfect fodder for bloodthirsty vamps in fishnet stockings and bright red lipstick.
Vampires and sex are commonplace in horror and Graveyard Shift is no different; an emphasis of this film is to establish that sex appeal, desire, lust, avarice, can be used as a tool to satiate the bloodthirst. Both Miranda and the various ladies he turned use their assets to attract fresh meat. What better time to hunt for prey than on the graveyard shift? And what better occupation than as a cabbie? A sob story, a suicidal desire to end it all and alleviate the burden that comes with dying, and a need of some sort of gratification that takes the pain away for even just a little while: Miranda gets it all the time, hopping into his cab, needing a ride, and he has an offer to them...

I will be honest. I knew very little about this film, other than it had a vampire cabbie working the late, late shift, using his job to scout potential victims. I did know that a second title was often applied to the movie, The Central Park Drifter, but I actually prefer Graveyard Shift myself. It was a way, I guess, to differentiate this film from the Stephen King crapfest that came just a little bit later. This film has a pace that moves, which I definitely liked, an editing and visual style akin to the rock videos you might have seen on Mtv during 1987, with the girls, their frizzy hair and slutty outfits (and uninhibited attitudes regarding sex) intact, and a steady diet of nubile flesh, eager fangs, and free-flowing blood.

I watched a VHS rip that had lines down it at times just proving that it has seen better days. Hell, I was just happy, and felt fortunate just to be able to see this. I imagine it does have a dvd by now, but this whole viewing was just spur of the moment. I was pleasantly surprised, although the film gets a bit Hammer Studios theatrical at the end, mostly Miranda's fault as he is prone to "strike a pose", particularly when the stake is driven through. The actresses playing the vamps really get into their roles, too. Papas gets a lot of dedicated time to her and the character; her conflict, the husband that has cheated on her, the seemingly open relationship that becomes tense when she barely hides her feelings for Vampire Cabbie, the body that is dying, the idea of becoming a vampire, and acknowledging that that new man in her life is a bloodsucker. A lot of this happens within just a couple days in the movie. She goes from a hot video in the throes of a tumultuous shoot, learning of her illness, meeting the cabbie by chance, feeling drawn to him, falling in love with him (and vice versa), and trying to protect him.