calvinnme ...but just didn't follow through.Ever wonder what Dracula would be like mashed up with Taxi Driver? Me neither, but I found this when I was cleaning out my stepson's room after he moved out, so I figured why not. Silvio Oliviero stars as an East European vampire working as a cab driver in NYC. He chooses his victims from the helpless and despondent fares that he picks up. He's grown world-weary, though, and is about ready to hang up his cape when he meets Michelle, a melancholy film director who has just learned she has an incurable fatal illness. They fall in love and mope together. Her former boyfriend doesn't approve, so he enlists a vampire-lore expert buddy to help put a stop to things.There's also a subplot about all of Silvio's prior victims coming back as vampires themselves and causing a murder spree across the city, much to the concern of two NYPD detectives. This is a very low budget affair, and almost resembles a student film for much of the running. The acting runs the gamut from poor to passable, while the use of colored lighting and moving cameras has some flash, even if the picture quality itself is bottom of the barrel. There are long scenes of vampiric erotica, akin to a toothier version of Red Shoe Diaries. This isn't worth seeking out, but I've seen much worse. There's a sequel - "The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II". I'm giving it 5/10 on the novelty coupled with the nostalgia since I do love those 80's.For some reason the DVD only seems available in full screen although it was originally shot in widescreen.

Wizard-8 There is an interesting and entertaining vampire movie buried deep deep down in the Canadian effort "Graveyard Shift", and occasionally it comes out and bares its fangs. For one thing, while the movie had a painfully low budget, it actually looks very decent. The photography and lighting is very eye-catching, and it also manages to generate a little atmosphere - you really feel the cold and creepiness of this setting. If only the screenplay had been given as much care as the movie's look and feel. For starters, you never get a real sense of what is going on in the characters' heads, particularly the taxi driving vampire. What was his past? What are his motivations? We never get the answers to questions like those. And the subplot with the estranged couple also has some vague touches and is not resolved in a satisfactory manner. The unanswered questions really pick up in the second half of the movie, with the plot really starting to become muddled. If you don't care about the plot and characters and are just looking for basic horror thrills, you'll likely be disappointed - there is not much blood and gore, though to compensate there are several instances where the characters take off their clothes. I don't think the movie works in the end, but apparently it did work for enough people during its initial release on home video, because there was a sequel the following year. But I'm in no rush to track down a copy.

Michael DeZubiria Given that the three people at the time of this writing who have reviewed Graveyard Shift (Not to be confused with 'Night Shift' or 'STEPHEN KING'S Graveyard Shift') on the IMDb have loved it, I assume I'm going to receive some angry e-mails, because this movie fits in with Nightmare Weekend as one of the worst horror films I've ever seen. On the other hand, one of those reviewers also said that the main character in this movie is the sexiest vampire in any movie ever, and this was written years after Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Gary Oldman had all played vampires. Thus is credibility erased.What you have in Graveyard Shift is a vampire with a heart of gold, I guess. He's a cab driver named Stephen and he only feeds on women who are already dying or willing to die, which leaves them alive and (oops!) running around the city killing people themselves. You know, maybe this is a requisite, but I would really love to see a vampire movie in which the vampires did not gape their mouths open as wide as possible, their eyes bugging out of their heads as they throw their head back for the camera to get a good look at their teeth as they slowly move toward the victim's neck.I'd like to say, on the record, that a great vampire movie could be made without showing a single fang. Or how about this? How about a movie vampire that can drink blood without getting it all over his face? This is what I hate about vampire movies. Vampires are sluggish, sloppy creatures. They live forever, but it just looks so foolish the way they open their mouths so wide and slowly move in to bite, and then once they do bite they start spitting blood all over themselves. What predator eats like that?? And to make matters worse, Stephen loses his virginity in this movie. What little scare ability he might have had is instantly gone.One of my favorite parts was the investigation of one of the murders that have been turning up. The police have caught on that it is a female killer (or killers), so I guess that's good. But check this out, here is a sample of the dialogue spoken between two cops when they find another body:Cop 1: It's gotta be a different woman.Cop 2: How do you know?Cop 1: Because the wounds are different!Ah, great thinking'. Different wounds, so there must be MULTIPLE female killers running around the streets. Interesting that they can be right and yet look so stupid, but that is what happens when you have a script as badly written as this one. These cops looks stupid because the screenwriter didn't know how to get them to realize that there is more than one woman out there killing people without having them circumvent all manner of serious police investigation. Logic would never lead them to the right answer in time, so we better just have them jump to conclusions. Even simply as a vampire story the movie fails miserably. There is a goofy love story drama that develops throughout the movie, which isn't sure if it is supposed to be a horror movie or a soap opera. It tries to be both and ends up being neither. The acting is staggeringly bad throughout, there are shots where Stephen is wearing so much white make-up on his face and hair that he literally, LITERALLY looks exactly like a clown, the soundtrack is of the prehistoric electronic beeps and bongs that briefly reared its ugly head in bad 80s films like this, and the film jumps around so much that at some points you may be wondering why two characters are standing in a soundstage talking about the cemetery set in front of them, and then the next scene takes place in a cemetery, the very same one that we just looked at the set of! I have never seen anything like that in a horror movie. The finale of this movie literally takes place in a cemetery, which we had just gotten a behind the scenes look at, and not only that, but one of the characters ends up running and escaping out one of the doors of the soundstage!Somebody please, PLEASE explain to me how this is, in ANY way, a 'smart, stylish horror flick.' This, my friends, is absolute drivel.

angelynx-2 This is a real find, a sharp, noir tale of isolation and loneliness on both sides of the mortal divide. Stylish compositions and lighting, made more effective by a storyline set entirely at night, shape the story of Stephen, a world-weary, centuries-old vampire drawing closer to his longed-for death by feeding only on already-dying women. The victims remain alive but develop an intense bloodlust which soon wraps the city in an epidemic of slasher murders, each needing blood at the same time as all the others (in a striking scene, one woman, trapped in prison at the moment that her sisters are killing, desperately tears open her vampire wound and drinks her own blood). Only the latest victim, Michelle, a terminal cancer patient with whom Stephen has fallen in love, is spared the craving. Michelle tries to save Stephen, but soon both the police and her jealous husband are closing in... The frequently half-naked female hunters add a fetishistic touch (but there's plenty of male nudity as well), and scene after scene takes place in red-walled rooms or tiny pools of light surrounded by pitch-black, neon-studded darkness and wet gleaming streets, lending an overall stark and haunting vibe. If you're a vampire fan but plush Gothic romances and big-budget killfests both leave you yawning, seek this one out.