Director Richard Wenk and producer Donald P. Borchers have clearly construed the film as sort of a quick knockoff of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), but with the addition of vampires. As in After Hours, there’s an akilter sense of anything can happen bizarreness at work – Chris Makepeace gets caught in a killer elevator and chased around the streets, there are meetings with albinoid street gangs and ambiguous girls who insist they know the hero but whom he can’t remember. But these scenes hit an oddly disjunct sense of humour that feels like a handful of elements that never satisfyingly connects into a whole. Richard Wenk doesn’t have the ability to weave them into a sense of the bizarrely weird like Scorsese did, leaving you with the feeling that you are caught in a nightmare that keeps taking even more surreal dogleg turns. Instead, the overall level of humour is juvenile. Wenk shoots everything in a garish pink and green lighting scheme – even the sewers are lit in pink and green. In its time, such a look seemed cutting edge but nowadays the results seem so datedly 1980s.

The best and most striking thing about the film is the primal charge that singer Grace Jones carries in her appearances. In piercing blue contact lenses, scarlet red hair, white body paint and a bikini of Day-Glo canework and avant-garde dance moves, crawling her way up Robert Rusler’s body with fangs bared to rip his throat out, she’s the one thing that lights the film up. Vamp is the only of Grace Jones’s film appearances – see also Conan the Destroyer (1984) and A View to a Kill (1985) – to exploit the animal rawness of her musical performing persona without wimping the character out.