Week of Review - Graveyard Shift (1990)

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So far in this Week of Review, all the King adaptations I’ve looked at have been fairly unique from one another, barring one crossover character.  That’s about to change with this film, Graveyard Shift.  Released in 1990, Graveyard Shift was adapted from a Stephen King short story of the same name, much like The Mangler.  Also much like The Mangler, Graveyard Shift revolves around a series of mysterious deaths in an industrial building that also happens to function as the lifeblood of a small Maine town and there’s an evil owner involved. 

You know, when you lay it all out like this it becomes A LOT clearer why Stephen King adaptations would more or less flame out hard in 1995 and not really recover till 2013.  Even accepting that The Mangler and Graveyard Shift are actually very different kinds of movies with unique approaches to horror the outward similarities are a little hard to overcome.  Of course the biggest difference, and this is a tough one to avoid, is that Graveyard Shift isn’t nearly as good as The Mangler.

Now don’t get me wrong, Graveyard Shift is a pretty enjoyable horror movie for what it is and what it is- is trash.  That’s not necessarily a value judgment, a lot of movies I really enjoy are trash and I do enjoy Graveyard Shift but let’s not lie to each other about what this movie is.  It’s a low budget little horror movie that feels about TV movie quality and indeed when I first saw it airing on TV one random Sunday afternoon I enjoyed it immensely. 

As I mentioned above Graveyard Shift is the story of a small Maine town whose major source of industry is the local textile mill.  Unfortunately for the townsfolk, the mill is infested with rats and the entire basement is dilapidated to the point it’s violating a number of safety standards.  Basically, the mill has one week to gets itself in order or be shut down, the only wrinkles in that scheme are the abusive and manipulative foreman Warwick, played by Stephen Macht, and a hideous giant rat/bat hybrid that’s prowling the bowels of the mill and killing people. 

Our hero is one John Hall, played by David Andrews, a drifter hired for the graveyard shift at the mill and put on the clean-up crew after an incident between him and Warwick over Warwick’s practices of sexually assaulting the women in his workforce.  If you’re worried the movie ever gets too graphic about that it’s actually surprisingly tasteful for such a lurid little detail.  We only ever hear about Warwick’s attempts to extort sex from the women under him and we never see it happen or even any attempts, though make no mistake Warwick is absolutely the villain here, even more than the giant rat/bat hybrid monster. 

Stephen Macht does a very good job with Warwick making him despicable but also banal without losing his eccentricity as a character.  He’s a cheap bastard who always finds ways to squeeze people for everything their worth but he never comes off as irrational about it, just very small and petty.  What’s more, he exudes any number of weird mannerisms, not the least of which being his Maine accent.  

That’s actually something very strange about the movie, aside from Pet Sematary 2 this is the only time I’ve ever seen a Stephen King movie where a character from Maine actually had a regional accent.  This actually gets really fun in the film’s third act where the whole crew are trapped in the lower levels of the mill and Warwick takes the opportunity to try and kill Hall, racking up a pretty high body count in the process. 

Speaking of Hall, he is absolutely the weak link of the film as, despite being our protagonist, he’s giving a fairly bland and lifeless performance, especially compared to Macht.  What’s more, one of the more sizable supporting roles of Tucker Cleveland, crazed Vietnam vet and exterminator, is played by the incomparable Brad Dourif and he just absolutely eats Andrew’s lunch.  

Dourif is one of our all-time great actors and even in this tiny role, he does a great job.  He gets an extended monologue talking about his time in Vietnam and why he hates rats that’s like about 3 straight minutes of the movie becoming infinitely better, to the point you just wish Brad Dourif’s crazy exterminator had been the main hero.  Sadly he’s only a minor character though he does have an adorable lapdog he’s trained to hunt rats- both of them end up crushed by a tomb.

Speaking of which, that’s probably the movie’s funniest conceit that “graveyard shift” is actually literal.  It turns out the mill is built on/next to an actual graveyard which connects to a series of underground tunnels and lost parts of the mill where the monster has been nesting.  Incidentally, if you’re hoping we’ll ever find out what the beast is or how it came to be- we never do, it’s just sort of accepted to be some freak of nature that happened naturally in Maine. 

The FX work on the creature is actually pretty impressive.  You never see it in whole or moving around because they couldn’t get it that good but it does wrap several people in its wings with some really cool latex work and the head and tail of the thing look appropriately gross.  In many ways, the production is actually lucky to have happened so early when practical FX were still the only real way to go as it’s far too easy to imagine the monster rendered in very poor CGI. 

Overall the production aesthetic of Graveyard Shift is really well done, probably the best part of the movie.  Unlike The Mangler, which had a weirdly crisp and artificial feel to it, Graveyard Shift’s industrial setting is damp and dank and disgusting, filled with rotting papers and destroyed furniture.  The mill and the multiple levels of building beneath are like a yawning dungeon and it reminds me a lot of the underground stuff from the likes of Creep (2004) or Mimic.  The final sub-layer of the mill turning out to be a vast cave full of human remains left by the beast is a pretty great last setting, especially as Warwick and Hall fight each other with bones as weapons. 

Graveyard Shift’s biggest problem is that it’s a bit too much like too many other things and not enough like itself.  Aside from the superficial similarities to The Mangler, the clean-up crew set-up reminds me a lot of Session 9 and the subterranean storytelling and “vermin as monster” set-up is thoroughly in line with Creep and Mimic as I mentioned.  None of that is to say it’s bad, as I said, the good FX and production design combined with Macht and Dourif’s performances and a quick 80-minute running time make this a breezy and enjoyable watch despite its various similarities.  It’s a movie you’re best going into not expecting much and meeting it on its own terms- you won’t be disappointed. 

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