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.

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.

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.
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