Download Graveyard Shift movie

Released in 1987 to video, Graveyard Shift was a small B class film about a vampire who drives a taxi cab at night. Originally this film was entitled Central Park Drifter but when the film was released to video the title was changed to Graveyard Shift.

Night brings out the hunger in people, especially a mysterious NY cab driver. He is a powerful vampire. And working the night shift brings a sultry array of sensuous passengers within his grasp. Embracing those ready to die, he controls an erratic but well-balanced vampire realm. Then unexpectedly, he discovers erotic human passion—unleashing a raging, terrorizing evil. When several innocent citizens are senselessly slaughtered, the baffled police must solve a 350-year-old mystery of unsated passion.

Cast

• Michael A. Miranda - Stephen Tsepes (as Silvio Oliviero)
• Helen Papas - Michelle Hayden
• Cliff Stoker - Eric Hayden
• Dorin Ferber - Gilda
• Dan Rose - Robert Kopple
• John Haslett Cuff - Detective Winsome
• Don James - Detective Smith
• Michael Bokner - Coronor
• Lesley Kelly - Officer Arbus
• Martin Bockner - Shlr Digger
• Frank Procopio - Marlo Bava
• Kim Cayer - Suzy
• Sugar Bouche - Fabulous Franne
• Jessie Taylor - Swimming Pool Blonde
• Ron Bacardi - Guy in Club
• Courtland Elliot - Junkyard Nightwatchman

The Graveyard Shift Legacy

• Graveyard Shift
• The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II

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The mutant rat movie to end all mutant rat movies

This might be the craziest Stephen King adaptation ever made (and yes,
I am aware of "The Lawnmower Man"). It's so f**king intense from start
to finish that it makes Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" look like a
Hallmark movie. The studio executives no doubt wanted to make a few
bucks with a by-the-numbers B-movie and chose the director based on his
past experience on a number of respectable projects; no one could have
predicted that he'd go balls-out crazy and treat a story about a mutant
rat monster as if he'd been handed the script to "Macbeth." A drifter named John arrives in the town of Gate's Falls and applies
for a job in a rat-infested textile mill run by Mr. Warwick (played by
an actor I'd never heard of named Stephen Macht, whose attempted Maine
accent sounds more Transylvanian), a deliriously evil man who rules not
only the mill, but the entire town, with an iron fist. Warwick
regularly strolls through the mill to laugh at how exhausted everyone
is and knowingly sends his employees to their doom in the basement,
which is inhabited by a huge rat-bat hybrid. This seems like an
extremely counterproductive way to run a business, but it's best not to
question anything in this movie. Meanwhile, an exterminator gone wrong
(Brad Dourif's performance will truly give you nightmares) attempts to
flush out the mill's rats, and John sort of develops a relationship
with the mill's secretary, although even the romantic scenes are not
handled calmly. As an example of the film's overall mood, at one point
Warwick sends John to help clean the basement; the script probably
said, "Warwick sends John to clean the basement," but it plays out with
Warwick and John staring each other down wild-eyed as if Warwick had
challenged John to a death-match; it is indeed the most intense "one
character asks another to do a simple task" scene in history.Basically everything in the movie is like that, until the final
sequence, at which point the maniacal director apparently tore the
script into confetti and threw it over his shoulder, because all nine
levels of hell break loose. Our small cleaning crew, including Warwick,
descends through a trapdoor and finds itself lost in a maze of wooden
tunnels, the mill being some kind of labyrinthine, "House of
Leaves"-style structure that extends hundreds of feet below the surface
of the earth, and the rat-bat begins killing them off. Warwick goes
completely off the beam about this time and begins chasing John and his
girlfriend through the tunnels, after smearing his face full of black
grease. He encounters the rat-beast and throws himself at it,
screaming, "We're going to hell… TOGETHAAAHHH!!!" Somehow, John and
Jane descend even DEEPER, and end up in a MASSIVE cavern packed full of
human bones; I could only imagine the director here running around
foaming at the mouth as he told his set design crew he needed the most
gigantic cavern ever put on screen. Then, through some miracle, our man
John makes it back into the textile mill, and finally defeats the
monster using, and this is no less crazy than it sounds, a Pepsi can.
All this is pretty much exhausting in its madness, but the movie isn't
about to let some trifle like an "ending" release its grip on the
viewer, as a nightmarish theme song then begins playing consisting of a
bizarre techno beat with sounds of industrial machinery and bits of
dialogue mixed over it. The tremendous amount of effort that was put
into this thing forces me to rate it 8/10; any less and I am afraid the
director might track me down and cut out my eyes or something. In
conclusion, see it.

Chromium_five from the wild frontier - 18 February 2009

Decent entry, if not overly spectacular

"Stephen King's Graveyard Shift" is a decent if not overwhelming
creature feature.**SPOILERS**Arriving in a small town, drifter John Hall, (David Andrews) gets
employment from Mr. Warwick, (Stephen Macht) to work in a textile mill,
and is thrown into the graveyard shift. Learning from the exterminator
Tucker Cleveland, (Brad Dourif) that the basement where he works is
infested with rats, and he suffers from ridicule from Ippeston, (Robert
Alan Beuth) Charlie Carmichael, (Jimmy Woodard) Danson, (Andrew Divoff)
Stevenson, (Minor Rootes) and Brogan, (Vic Polizos) others who also
work at the factory. When they manage to get onto the basement clean-up
shift along with Jane Wisconsky, (Kelly Wolf) they find that the rats
are merely covering for another giant, flesh-eating creature which
haunts the basement and struggle to get away from the creature.The Good News: There wasn't a whole lot to this one which really
worked. One of the best parts about it is the underground basement
setting, which is creepy. The setting here, from the set-up of the
facility which has been packed to the brim with a huge assortment of
junk spread all over the place with the boxes of papers, discarded
cardboard boxes and unused or broken equipment all piled together in a
singular location alongside rats and sewer water together for an
inherently creepy setting. The fact that this also feels realistic due
to the loudness of the machines and how much heat they produce, another
factor also helping the film's atmosphere as well. There's also the
best action scene in the film, the whole last half of the film. This is
a never-ending series of scenes where one thing keeps happening after
another to keep the viewer interested and excited in all that's going
on. There's several extended chases through the location, a couple of
fine destruction pieces resulting from action taken against it, a fun
brawl amongst a collection of skeletons and bones and some really
disturbing parts as well, such as the spider sequence or the really
cool coffin-sinking in the cemetery which are really cool. The last
good part to this is the revelation of the real creature doing the
killings, which is a nice swerve from the rats doing it and really
works in here, coming as a nice surprise and being a logical one as
well. These here are the film's good points.The Bad News: There was a few problems to this one that hold it down.
The first is that there's really few moments of action at all during
the beginning, which really makes it feel quite boring at times.
Without much happening in the way of action, mostly around the fact
that this one deals with the dealings behind the scenes at the mill,
which are handled quite badly as they try several different methods and
back-stories to keep interest, from the love angle that's entirely
clichéd to begin with, to the hazing of the older people and the really
weak storyline about the different conditions in the basement. Despite
the suspense, these are deadly dull and aren't all that exciting or
interesting. That these have no kills at all is where another flaw gets
exposed, since the kills here are pretty weak. They're not all that
gory or bloody at all, and despite a few instances of aftermath
visible, this one has none at all and really doesn't have all that many
for a creature feature anyway. The last flaw in here is that there's a
major problem with the creature in this. The fact is that it turns into
a major cheat when there's a bunch of evidence to point as rats being
the main threat, yet there's no rats doing the killing. It's an
entirely different creature, one that's hidden until the end and
rightfully so as it's quite terrible-looking when it does appear.
There's no way it would've put much fright into anything that would've
really counted, and it just makes it's scenes a big disappointment.
These here are the film's flaws.The Final Verdict: Pretty much evenly splint between good points and
bad points, this one has enough though to make it worthwhile. Give this
one a shot if you find these kinds of films entertaining or if you are
a fan of the creative side, while if that doesn't appeal to you or
aren't a fan of these, seek caution.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language

slayrrr666 (slayrrr666@yahoo.com) from Los Angeles, Ca - 3 October 2008

Drop the F, and you have a pretty accurate description

When Stephen King hit his stride as an author whose nearly superhuman
literary output averaged at least one book per year, his whoring of the
rights to said books also yielded more rancid cinematic rapes than a
crime-scene photographer (or film critic) would wish to count.
"Graveyard Shift" is one such rancid production, a film whose sheer
badness on almost every level makes it a slightly hypnotic,
"let's-see-how-much-worse-it-can-get" venture, but mostly winds up a
jaw-dropping exercise in futility. Based on the short story of the same
name from King's "Night Shift" anthology, one would think a 90-minute
film would be the ideal forum to iron out the nuances of a compact
literary piece. Then again, that would require filmmakers who know how
to expand the material in a creative, interesting way, and one of
"Graveyard Shift"'s many problems is that the source story isn't the
greatest, and John Esposito's adaptation and Ralph Singleton's
direction doesn't know where to go with it. While this tale of
textile-mill workers abused by a shifty, sadistic foreman (Stephen
Macht) and menaced by a subterranean rat-bat seems a muddled allegory
for the human "rat race" being a literal dive into the darkest pit of
Hell, it is lost in the onslaught of terrible acting and unfocused
characters. While King (not to mention directors who understand his
work) brings a certain local quirkiness to his patented New Englanders,
here they are transformed into grotesque, unpleasant yokels whose
punchlines fall completely flat (the worst miscalculation being Brad
Dourif's hambone Exterminator)–the violence lacks any irony, and is
just more grist for the blood-spattered mill. The only remotely
credible actor is Macht, whose performance hints at campy greatness
that goes unrealized as a result of the script's awkward attempts at
intentional comedy. The only thing that really gives "Graveyard Shift"
any redeeming value is the often-creative set design (including an
underground labyrinth that threatens to create actual atmosphere), and
the not-bad (but far from great) creature FX; additionally, the small
New England town does evoke King's prose with some credibility–it's too
bad nobody could think of a way to put it to good use.

Jonny_Numb from Hellfudge, Pennsylvania - 28 June 2008

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