Graveyard Shift (1990)

John Hall (David Andrews) – a drifter running away from a tragic past in the traditional American style – comes to an equally traditional American small town looking for work. In what will turn out not to be too lucky a circumstance, he hires on in the local textile mill run by one Mr Warwick (Stephen Macht, going for a truly bizarre line delivery/voice).

The place is a rat infested crap-hole and Warwick’s a tyrannical sleazebag who’d get me-too’d right quick just now, but a job’s a job, right? Unfortunately, there’s even worse going on than just the worst boss ever and a rat problem the Vietnam vet (of course) exterminator (Brad Dourif) can’t bring under control. When John and some colleagues are sent to clean up the mill’s basement on the Fourth of July weekend, they’ll soon encounter the thing that has been eating various characters while nobody but the audience was looking for the last forty minutes or so.

Ralph S. Singleton’s Graveyard Shift, based on a short story by Stephen King, is generally treated as one of the lesser King adaptations. It’s not difficult to see why: Singleton’s not really the sort of director capable of smoothing out too many budgetary rough edges; indeed, his style is pretty freaking bland. The script, while containing some good ideas, doesn’t really seem to know how to effectively use them, nor how to bring the short story to feature length beyond following the old horror writer adage of “add more murders”, which doesn’t exactly help the pacing along either. The special effects are all over the place: some do look cool and/or effective, and the main monster’s nature does at least win points via its sheer grotesqueness, but a lot of what’s on screen does neither work terribly well nor look interesting enough to make one ignore its somewhat shaky quality.

However, there are some interesting and worthwhile elements on screen. First and foremost, this – like Tobe Hooper’s equally loathed but actually much superior King short story adaptation The Mangler – is another King adaptation that does go the – still not terribly common in horror – road of using working class characters, instead of white collar people, as its central protagonists, automatically winning at least a degree of thematic resonance by entwining its unnatural threat with the more quotidian one of economical exploitation. Of course, the film does tend to fall back on so much standard clichéd shortcuts about how working class people behave, and can’t help itself but give its hero a college degree, so it’s difficult to make out if anyone involved is talking about the plight of the working class on purpose, or only because they were too lazy to change King’s set-up. But hey, it’s still more than The Conjuring has to say.

Depending on your taste, another aspect of the film will either be a great turn-on or turn you off of this completely: it’s the performances by Macht and Dourif. Now, we all know that beloved horror icon Brad Dourif does tend to chew as much scenery as a director will allow him, having learned early on that these are the sort of calories that don’t make a guy fat (unless he’s Orson Welles). Singleton must have told him to go all out or something of that manner, for even Dourif seldom delivers scenery chewing quite as intense as he does here. His Vietnam rat story (and his tobacco chewing) alone is either – if you’re like me - worth the price of admission, or going to drive you batty. Add to that Macht, who here always seems to chomp a cigar even when he has nothing at all in his mouth, and goes for the sort of line delivery that’d make Christopher Walken go “whoa”, and you’re either in heaven, or running away screaming. I suspect you’re not going to scream as entertainingly as Macht does, once he gets really mad, though.

Graveyard Shift also features some scattered moments of actual effective horror (obviously following the nugget theory of horror proposed by King in “Danse Macabre”). There’s one late character death that does indeed come as a bit of a surprise and a shock, for one, but even better is the “Rats in the Wall”-style underground bone hill parts of the finale take place on.


That’s probably not enough to put this into the highlights of anyone’s horror watching year, but I find myself thinking rather fondly of Singleton’s only feature film despite its major flaws.