Graveyard Shift (1990) Review

Graveyard Shift (1990) Review

Graveyard Shift is loosely based on one of Stephen King’s short stories. In the past, his short stories have made for some great segments in anthology movies (Cat from Hell in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) and full-length movies (The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me). So Graveyard Shift should make for a great movie…right?  

It opens with a guy working in a sweaty textile mill infested with rats. He throws one of them in the toothy machinery that separates the cotton or flattens it or rips it or whatever (I’m thinking this is probably frowned upon but obviously the guy doesn’t care) but then he’s attacked by some unseen beast that pushes him into the machine, killing him. 

After this intriguing pre-credits opening, it gets into the main story, about a drifter who gets hired by the mill’s grumpy foreman. Workers keep getting killed during the graveyard shift (hey, like the title!) from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. so it’s an extra-sketchy job, but soon he puts a bunch of workers on a new work detail: clean up the rat problem in the basement. Of course there’s something worse than just rats lurking down there. 

Graveyard Shift is definitely one of the worst movies to be based on any of Stephen King’s stories. The actual premise itself? Not that bad. The main problem is the characters. They’re all uninteresting or unlikable, with one exception: The Exterminator, played by the always-great character actor Brad Dourif. He goes off on a tangent about rats and how they’ve been used for torture/murder, and it’s one of the only great moments in the movie. Unfortunately, he gets an underwhelming death scene (it’s not even death by rats!) and then, inexplicably, it cuts to a shot of the foreman that was used in the previous scene, only it cuts sooner, before he says his line. It’s obvious someone thought they could get away without shooting an alternate take and use the same shot without anyone noticing, but guess what? Someone noticed. 

There’s a lot of footage of rats, but none of it is particularly scary. If you want a movie with creepy rat scenes, watch something like Willard or its sequel Ben or even The Rats (which I reviewed last year).  Apparently the filmmakers were aware of better rat films, because there’s a moment when a character is reading Ben. I guess they were aware of those movies, just not aware of what made them scary. 

A hugely disappointing aspect is the creature, mainly because of its untapped potential. It’s shown in glimpses throughout, but you know early on there’s some kind of monster lurking in the basement, and you’re just waiting to see it kill all of the characters. The special effects are actually decent, even if the creature, which is supposed to be some kind of mutant rat-bat, looks more like a bat had sex with the xenomorph from Alien. Unfortunately, they never give it a moment to shine, not even at the end, and it doesn’t kill enough of the cast. The kills it does make are gory but unremarkable. 

What's most inexcusable of all is the lack of scares and how generally boring the whole thing is. There is not one instance of scariness in this whole movie. Even in a not-great movie like Children of the Corn (also based on a Stephen King short story) there’s at least a creepy factor, and that movie didn’t feel dragged out. Graveyard Shift felt like it would never end, and it’s less than 90 minutes. Unless Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption) or Rob Reiner (Stand by Me) are behind the script, studios just shouldn’t turn King’s short stories into feature-length movies.

Am I being a bit hard on Graveyard Shift? Maybe. It’s not the worst movie in the Stephen King library, but it’s certainly among them. Aside from a couple positives, Graveyard Shift is tedious, by-the-numbers, and unoriginal.