STEPHEN KING'S GRAVEYARD SHIFT

 

Graveyard Shift is a 1990 horror flick based on one of Stephen King’s short stories of the same name. The plot is pretty simple enough (as is, of course, usually the case with horror flicks): workers get killed off by a huge bat-like creature at a rat-infested textile mill during the--that’s right!--graveyard shift. Frankly, there have only been a few movies based on Stephen King novels/stories that have been on par with the novels--Carrie, The Shining and Pet Cemetery come to mind--and Graveyard Shift doesn’t even come close to matching the quality of those films. In fact, this flick employs just about every horror flick cliché imaginable. For instance, when the main character first comes into town in search of employment and he enters a diner, he gets--surprise!--accosted by a group of dimwitted hooligans. And, from there, the clichés just keep coming (e.g. people keep disappearing mysteriously, the lone black guy in the film dies horribly, etc.)! However, that isn’t to say that aren’t some truly horrifying aspects to this film. For instance, Brad Dourif--who, as horror aficionados no doubt know, provided the voice of Chucky in the Child’s Play movies (as well as starring in the critically-acclaimed cinematic adaptations of the Lord Of The Rings novel trilogy)--plays a really creepy exterminator who starts the movie off by dumping rat feces into the local water supply. Nice! Anyway, there’s one scene in the flick when Brad is having a rather creepy conversation with the main character while he’s working the--of course!--graveyard shift and he tells how in Vietnam the Vietnam Cong would strap American POWs on the ground via stakes, cut a wound up above the prisoner’s abdomen and stick a rice ball into the open wound and let the rats feed. Yum! This was actually one of the creepiest scenes in the whole entire flick. As for the creature that’s doing the killing, it was actually pretty scary-looking. Keep in mind this was before the advent of CGI. Of course, even with CGI, sometimes the creatures in these flicks are a little less than horrifying. But, I must say, they actually did a pretty good job of making the bat-like creature--why they didn’t make it look more rat-looking is beyond me--look pretty damn realistic. I know if I ever came across that thing, I’d be getting the hell out of Dodge REAL damn quick! One thing that kind of bothered me is that the chick in the flick--who may or may not had been the main character’s love-interest in the film (the characters aren’t too fleshed-out in the film so it’s kind of hard to tell)--gets offed by the mill’s rather sadistic foreman who goes batcrap crazy (pardon the pun!) before being off himself by the creature. Another thing that got to me about this flick is that when people start being killed off by the creature no one really seems to notice or to care. And, when someone brings up the “disappearance” of a certain character, one of the other characters says something like, “Oh, they just left.” Overall, Graveyard Shift isn’t the worst horror flick ever produced (reread my earlier reviews of The Bleeding--which was hilariously bad!--and the blatant Friday the 13^th rip-offs the Bloody Murder films). Still, I was kind of surprised Stephen King allowed his name to be associated with this thing, which, of course, the producers of this flick probably did just to gain more attention to said flick, which, judging from the film’s rather lukewarm reception (it was a modest box office hit at best), that strategy apparently didn’t work none too well. In any case, as is usually the case with movies based on books and/or stories, do yourself a favor and read the original story published in King’s short story anthology Night Shift (which is one of my favorite Stephen King books of all-time). Of course, this film might be more "horrific" for those who are afraid of rats, especially since it looks like they used real live rats in this flick (whereas, again, nowadays they'd probably just CGI the whole thing). Just a suggestion!