In rural Oklahoma, a ranch hand named Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) gives a young blonde named Mae (Jenny Wright) a ride. She has a fascination with the night, horses don’t like her, and she’s adamant about getting home before dawn. During their makeout session, she bites Caleb on the neck, and runs off. Sunlight suddenly becomes his enemy.

Before Caleb can make it home to his pa (Tim Thomerson), a Winnebago with tape over the windows scoops him up. Severen (Bill Paxton) is a bad ass who wants to take the kid’s head off with his spurs. Homer is a sullen 12-year-old kid. Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein) is the group mother and Jesse (Lance Henriksen) their leader.

None of them enjoy the sunlight either, and Caleb’s life is spared when Mae lets them know he’s already “turned.” Jesse decides to give him a week, to see if they can call Caleb one of them.

While Caleb’s pa takes to the road to find him, Mae rejuvenates the sickly cowboy by letting him drink blood from her wrist. She tells him that they can do anything they want, until the end of time, but the cruel reality is that he has to learn to kill in order to survive.

Severen, the kid, and Jesse & Diamondback are all shown employing unique methods for luring victims to their demise. In the film’s best scene – and one of the standouts in ’80s B-cinema – the gang stroll into a redneck bar, and slowly it dawns on the patrons that none of them are going to be leaving alive.

Caleb refuses to kill anyone, and draws the wrath of the gang when he lets one of the bar patrons escape. They’re awakened by the police, who have surrounded their motel room. Caleb redeems himself by helping the gang escape, but has to decide which family he belongs to when the gang stumbles across his pa and little sister on the road.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Eric Red wanted to write a western together, but discovered the genre was so unpopular at the time, they’d have to mix it with something else in order to get financing. Horror was still big, so they settled on a vampire western, which in the mid-’80s, ended up being a novel concept.

Near Dark was the last movie distributed by DeLaurentis Entertainment Group before the studio went bankrupt. It failed to receive the promotion necessary for it to be successful at the box office, but grew on word of mouth, and has since become a cult classic. Many feel it’s one of the best vampire movies ever made.

There’s a lot to admire about this flick, no question. Instead of following the cliches of the vampire movie handbook, Bigelow & Red don’t even address them. The word “vampire” is never spoken. There are no fangs, no Michael Jackson contact lenses, no vampire makeup at all. The filmmakers had no interest in any of those adornments.

Near Dark is one of the few movies to explore in stark, practical terms what it might be like to become a supernatural creature, without any Bela Lugosi bullshit about coffins, crosses or levitation. The result is a dark and dirty drive-in feature that feels real.

After the brilliant bar takedown and shootout with the cops, I could sort of sense the movie wouldn’t stay this good, and it definitely doesn’t. The script is ultimately more promise than payoff. The final half hour feels strained, almost completely stripped of the creativity the first hour and ten minutes are chock full of.

Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton had just finished working together on Aliens, and each auditioned unaware who else was up for parts. They’re terrific here again, and Paxton absolutely steals the show, again. Bigelow restrains herself from using excessive gore, and most of the ideas she and Red came up with elevate the film above genre.