Taxi drivers. There have been a few notable drivers of the small yellow combustion engined rickshaws of our day, like Robert DeNiro and the cast of "Taxi" come to mind... followed by little else. The cabby life isn't often the subject of horror films, though from stories I've heard about friends and their families' experiences with them, I'm surprised there aren't more. Sure, there's a killer cab driver in The Bone Collector and a mysterious cabby in the old Japanese horror flick Jigoku, but aside from these two instances, there's little to connect the world of the stalwart cab driver and the genre of blood, guts and creatures of the dark... leave it to the Canadians to amend this stupid little idea. Oh, and by the way, this isn't the Stephen King movie about the big killer vermin in the textile factory, in case all this talk about cab drivers hadn't made that clear enough for you.
Meet Stephen Tsepes, employee for the Black Cat Cab Company on the graveyard shift in the city that never sleeps... or is New York the city that never stops mugging and exploiting? Whatever it is, there's something not right about Stephen that sets him apart from others in his line of work. Is it that he's an Italian Canadian? Nah. Is it that he's got more vowels in his name than cab drivers are legally allowed to have (no more than 1 per every 7 consonant)? Nah, this is made in Canada, not New York City (where it's set), so they wouldn't know about that law. Is it the odd hours, pale skin, extended canines and the taste for plasma? Hmmmmm, I'll have to think about that one... Yes, that's right, Stephen's a insomniac necrophiliac hemophiliac... or a vampire if you wanna get anal about it. This is no surprise of course, considering all the vampires that have set up shop in the Big Scrapple since the introduction of horror to the moving picture medium. To start our story, Mr. Tsepes picks up just another fare in the shape of a semi-attractive, but completely out of her blond head, woman who seems suicidal and a little panicky over something. Being a kind, concerned and good Samaritan cab driver like all NYC taxi jockeys (well, he at least speaks English, which puts him 5 steps above 97% of all the other cabbies in the city), Stephen settles the woman down and convinces her that he can, and will help her. This "help" of course consists of banging her like a car door and draining her blood from a painful puncture in the tit. But, he doesn't just kill her like she asks, no, that'd be too easy, so instead he feeds her some of his own crimson and turns her into one of the walking undead. Our hero then goes off to finish his shift before heading home to sleep nekkid in his coffin. That's no big deal really, I mean lots of people sleep like that, including me... though the naked part is a little strange... if anyone got that last joke AND got a chuckle out of it, thanx for the pity folks, cuz even fake laughs give me a sense of worth around here.
I have to wonder about what Stephen just did. Not the naked coffin nap or finishing his shift, but turning a strung out crack whore into a vampire. First off, Stephen turns out to be one of those "be very subtle about the whole, 'vampires really exist and they drive cabs'" kind of humanoid leaches, so I don't think turning an addict into one of his own is a great plan. Hell, it's not even a mildly decent plan, and it sure as fuck not a well thought out plan. The broad's gonna be snagging meat left and right when she gets hungry, she's not gonna be the least bit worried about sticking to the shadows or disposing of her victims in secluded, undiscoverable places, cuz all she's gonna care about is feeding her new addiction. I don't need to be an oracle to see that this is going to be one conversion that Tsepes will be regretting by movie's end. Secondly, the woman wanted to die, her life was insufferable and she couldn't deal with it anymore, existence had become a gut rotting plague for her... okay, so maybe I'm over-dramatizing the situation a tad, but how is giving this chick eternal life and a painful addiction "helping" her? Trust me kids, if someone you know is trying to commit suicide, just let 'em go at it. If they succeed, then their pain's over with. If they pussy out, then they don't really want to die and they were just looking for attention. If you "save" them, then all it means is that they're gonna be putting a gun to their head every time they're not the center of attention or friends and family get sick of listening to them prattle on about their stupid life. Plus, if you stop them anyway, chances are they'll just go on depressed and miserable, only they're not likely to have to strength to go through with it. If you miss the first opportunity, every one after is just gonna be harder and harder to go through... trust me, I'm the God of Death, shit like this is my job and you have no idea how many of these sob stories I have to listen to on a daily basis with these fucking zombies.
Sorry about the diatribe, let me get on with this stupid little movie so I don't waste too much more of your valuable time... you make me sick! Err, nevermind that... again, sorry. Back to the movie. Okay, so, sure enough Steph's new stripper friend (wow, a vampire stripper, who'd ever have thought...) makes a snack out of a guy who's a fan of her work, slashing him up with a straight razor and slurping his warm and sticky life fluids down her blood hole... though she is a woman, so I guess I should specify when I refer to her "blood hole"... I meant her mouth that time... The victim gets a one way ticket to the city morgue, where some of the worst actors in Canada's history of bad actors argue with each other over the corpse and who knows whose job better. A riveting scene to rival anything in Guns Of Navarone without a doubt... Meanwhile, we turn our attention to a frustrated young female director who's had her latest heartfelt project torn out from under faster than a prostitute the very second her hour's up. The disappointed woman then catches a ride with, who else, NYC cab driver Stephen Tsepes. Steph doesn't make a fang-to-tit connection with this one though, but you can smell the workings of a budding love interest heavy in your nostrils. After dropping Michelle (the she-director) off at her home, Steph makes his way to his stripper bitch's apartment to discipline her for killing before he could approve it, and being the saucy wench she be, she puts up a struggle. I think it's time for Steph to take a cue from Master Sardu and break out the chains, riding crop and studded leather bikini speedo... it is Friday after all.
Later on, during his daylight slumbers, Steph is already having daydreams of unholy matrimony with Michelle as his long-toothed bride-to-be. If he's already thinking about marrying this broad he just met, I'm pegging Steph to be one of those whipped husbands who works all night, only to come home to his once lovely wife (now over 500lbs. and wedged into their reinforced barcalounger) who now nags him for being a lazy slob who sleeps all day, forgetting he's a vampire and forcing him to do the dishes and clean the bathroom before he just gives in and lets the morning sun engulf him in a pyre of salvation, turning him to ash and burning down the entire apartment complex in the aftermath, including turning Michelle into 500lbs. of barbecued pork. Speaking of which, the following evening Michelle gets some unsettling news that a recent trip to the doctor's office has turned up with bad results: she's got a fatal and incurable disease that is never named, though I'm guessing it's either HIV, a cancer of some kind or level 10 halitosis... well, bad breath can be fatal... to her social life... you don't like it, then YOU can write these stupid things! In a turn that's far more "creepy stalker moment" than "happy coincidence", Michelle hails a cab to head home, only to find it's her pale faced knight in grungy street clothes and his four-wheeled, dinghy yellow steed. When he takes her home, the connection becomes to become painfully more blatant, as Michelle invites this semi-stranger to a Halloween party she's having on Friday night. Steph accepts and also learns of Michelle's openly unfaithful hubby Eric, for whom I know wouldn't be making bets on to survive till the last reel.
Just when it looks like everything's coming up Stephen, our Nosferatu gets mugged by a couple of unruly Canucks (lot of them in NYC this time of night) who, needless to say (though I'll say it anyway, like I always do), don't exactly get the chance to enjoy the fruits of their thugging labors, and by morning they're just two more names for the growing list of recent non-voluntary blood donors in the area. While the fuzz rattle their pea-brains over this baffling case (I love how cops in these flicks are so quick to disavow the idea that it might be a vampire, though EVERY time it turns out to be some supernatural marauder. You'd think the NYPD would have special conduct for cases like this by now), Steph takes the invite to Michelle's swarrey. No sooner are the two dancing and socializing, then Eric gets all huffy and begins accusing Michelle of whoring her heart off to her new cabbie pal. When she storms out in search of understanding from Mr. Tsepes, she catches him in the back of his cab sucking up the night's kill. Steph, with no other option (except maybe to kill her of course, though that's ALWAYS my first option), reveals his secret to Michelle and makes clear his intentions to offer her an alternative to rotting away from her disease. If you guessed that he's giving her the choice to become a vampire with him, then I'll be damned but you're one swift cookie my friend... This brings up a nitpicker question though, that claws it's way from the back of my head and forces itself onto my keyboard: will turning her into a vampire mean the ailment will stop, or will she just be forced to suffer through it forever? I mean, it would make sense that it would stop if she were to become a vamp, as vampires are the walking undead. Without live tissue to feed on, the source of the condition would just die out and that's the end of that. However, if these bloodsuckers are really dead, then how come Steph can get an erection and go spelunking in ladies like he did with the stripper in the beginning? Just something to get your brain cells firing after all that airplane glue you've been sniffing has made your gray matter virtually comatose.
After thinking about it briefly, Michelle accepts the offer with open legs, uhm, arms, and the two waste no time into getting busy with it. Meanwhile, Steph's pseudo-harem (what, you thought the stripper was the first for him?) goes out to feed, including one sexy little vamp who also happens to be a cop! Hey, Steph can't support all those chicks on a cabby's wages, so at least some of them are expected to get employment of their own to help out. Anyway, as for that cop broad, she makes her partner her meal before getting gunned down by one of the dicks working the throat slashing murders. Back to Steph and Michelle, after he pops her cork, he admits his love for her and, after centuries of existence, he's finally ready to die after finding real love... I'm usually left with the same self-mutilating feelings after I find "love" too. When he takes her back home, Steph faints at the house and Eric has to carry him inside, where Michelle insists he stays and rest despite Eric's thoughts that he should instead be taken to a hospital. Back to the cop chick, she was merely wounded by the flying lead sheathed in her body, not killed, so she winds up in a jail cell, where she writhes in pain from her gnawing hunger, unable to get out and have sip. Steph stays with Eric and Michelle a few days, until he kills one of their visiting friends out of desperation for his own sustenance. While he and Michelle attempt to dispose of the body, hacking her up Evil Dead style to keep her from coming back like them, Eric happens to spy the proceedings and thinks Michelle's being forced to help Stephen in a common New York murder.
Eric then confronts Michelle when she's alone and argues with her over whether they should call the cops and bring Steph's actions to their attention. When Steph returns to the house after finishing with his victim's disposal, he attacks Eric in an effort to keep this whole fuck up hush hush. Michelle interjects to try and talk some reason into the two, which just opens up the opportunity for Eric to go all "pro wrestling villain" and stab Stephen in the back with a knife while his focus is elsewhere. Things start to fall into chaos now as Eric runs off to seek help from a friend who happens to be a fearless vampire slayer so they can kill the debonair cab driving corpse, Steph and Michelle head back to his apartment so she can feed him and regenerate him, the incarcerated bloodsucker cop finally breaks down and tries to feed on herself in jail and the police force put out an A.P.B. on Tsepes's cab.... you can tell the director's trying to rush all of this shit so he can come in under the time constraint without cutting out all of that "plot" and "atmosphere" crap. For no real reason I can imagine, Steph and Michelle make their way to the graveyard sound stage of Michelle's latest weirdo artsy music video job, where they're followed by Eric and his second rate Van Helsing. While Stephen deals with those two, Michelle is attacked by one of Stephen's fanged harem, who is intent on turning Michelle into a vampire, so she won't be special anymore and will be nothing more than another hole for our hero to bury Lil' Stephen in when he gets bored.
Enraged by this turn of events, Stephen distracts himself momentarily by ripping off the vampire bitch's head, though he's too late to keep Michelle "pure". He then goes back to Eric, prepared to finish him off, only to have an unsavory and large splinter planted in his back courtesy of Eric's fat amigo. But, before all is said and done, the rest of the harem arrive, converge on the studio and tear fatty into bite-sized chunks before Eric puts an end to all the extras, opening the front door and drowning them in sunlight... wait, wasn't it just the middle of the night 5 MINUTES AGO!? Damn, they've got some pretty fast sunrises in Canada this time of year! Oh, excuse me, in "New York". Either way, that big ball of flaming gases just creeps up on ya sometimes. The baddies melt into goo and Eric gathers up Michelle with the intentions of staking her. Before he can finish the job though, the cops on the vampire case bust in and gun the bastard down, shooting first and leaving the questions completely out of the equation. In a short (and all too blatant) epilogue that we all saw coming 5 blocks away, we say our last goodbye to Michelle as she picks up where Steph left off, driving around in her after dark cab, showing her customers a good time on the Graveyard Shift. Everyone all together now and let out a sigh of disappointment.... now. That's better.
A vampire cab driver isn't a bad concept, The Graveyard Shift was. It's an interesting concept for a movie, after all, what better than a villain who can only exist after dark making a living from giving rides to people, only to kill them and drink their blood amidst the enveloping darkness? Tourists, college kids, drunks at closing time, all these are people that can easily be dismissed when no one hears from them again, because Stephen's drank them dry for his evening quickie. Too bad it had to be put into such incompetent hands and played by such a horrible actor. ALL of it was bad. The love story was so heavy with cheese I was starting to wonder if it was released by the Canadian division of Kraft™. So predictable and at the same time so blandly directed and badly acted by the entire cast. When you get to the last 20 minutes or so, the shit hits the fan and you've got cinematic feces flying all over the place. Like I said, it looks like it turned into a rush job late in the game. Maybe the director was just getting bored with the whole thing and wanted to get it over with instead of just dumping what he had. Not even the soundtrack helped the movie make an impression on me, unless it's the impression of a rubber stamp that reads "crock of shit" on my soul. As for the aftermath, the only point of interest really is writer/director Jerry Ciccoritti, who went on to make a semi-decent name for himself amidst the Sci-Fi Channel geeks in the medium of television. Fans will note his work as director of the "Highlander: The Series" and "Forever Knight" shows, as well as a few episodes of "La Femme Nikita", "Poltergeist: The Legacy", a TV movie for William Shatner's "TekWar" and an old favorite of mine, "Due South"... hey, I got a thing for "fish out of water" Mounties, I think they're funny, they make me laugh... As far as movies, Ciccoritti went on to do the Graveyard Shift sequel, The Understudy... and that's about it. Oh well, he should be thankful he enjoyed that little bit of work, considering how much this flick opened wide to suck as much as cinematically possible down it's proverbial throat, like the prison bitch it is, to be passed from one large, tattooed biker thug of a reviewer to the next. Speaking of which, I think it's time I trade this flick to Mitch for a box of smokes and a nudie mag...
The Moral of the Story: Cab drivers are the devil! Even if you find one that
does speak English, the words "slow the fuck down before you kill us all" are not in their vocabulary. Always get the number for a good car service in the area or just grab mass transportation. You'll thank me when you're sitting in your cozy $300 a night hotel room and see three individual stories on the local news about bad accidents ending in limbs everywhere and a rolling ball of flames and twisted metal.
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- Despite the premise of a vampire cabbie, this movie's
so not worth it. Way too boring, not nearly enough substance for party fare.
Sequel: Graveyard Shift II: The Understudy
If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: The Bone Collector or Tale of A Vampire
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