Stephen King and Hollywood has always had an unsteady relationship. For every good to decent film produced from the prolific horror-meister's works (Misery,Pet Semetary,Stand By Me) there have been several more middling to downright awful ones (Children of the Corn,The Lawnmower Man,The Dark Half). Graveyard Shift, a 1990 adaptation of King's same named short story, is absolutely in the latter category. Graveyard Shift is a complete waste of time and celluloid, devoid of any scares, laughs or any other redeeming quality. If you want a bottom of the barrel Stephen King film, look no further than this travesty.
Set in a cotton mill in what I guess is supposed to be Maine (one character references Castle Rock, King's well known fictional Maine town), Graveyard Shift begins with a character who likes to shoot rats with rocks being attacked by . . . something . . . and then dying in the cotton picker. Into town walks John Hall (Dave Andrews) a drifter looking for work, who lands a job at the mill, under the direction of the rather unkind, and potentially unhinged, foreman, Warwick (Stephen Macht). Warwick is a rather despicable character, using the female employees to fulfill his sexual needs while trying to cut a few bucks here and there in regards to worker safety. When he is ordered to clean up the basement or be shut down, he recruits several of the plant workers for the job, but they quickly realize that there is . . . something . . . down there in the basement with them.
Graveyard Shift is the kind of film that used to be cranked out in the 1970s and 80s by major studios, I suspect, because they were cheap to make and even with a lower than average box office compared to major films, they still managed to turn a decent profit for the studio. Because it is almost certain no one was greenlighting Graveyard Shift because it promised to be a good movie. And a good movie is definitely not what director Ralph S. Singleton and screenwriter Jon Esposito have supplied. There is nothing of value in Graveyard Shift. The characters are almost exclusively ciphers, existing for no other reason than to be picked off one by one by the film's creature that lives in the mill. Main character John Hall has no development to speak of, and the attempt by the filmmakers to create a relationship between him and female worker Jane (Kelly Wolf) is dead on arrival. Neither character is interesting, or heck, even really present, other than to serve as something for the camera to be focused on most of the time.
Stephen Macht provides a seemingly hissable villain in the form of Warwick, but he is almost completely a caricature, a creation of the screenplay to give us someone to root against, not a three dimensional character. When he goes off his rocker towards the end of the film, it is completely out of left field, not something that has been building throughout the narrative. The only character who is even vaguely interesting is the exterminator called in to deal with the rat problem at the mill, played by Brad Dourif. His exterminator holds a personal vendetta against rats due to their use in torture when he was in Vietnam (and I wonder if some material intended for his character was transplanted to Warwick at some point in the re-write stage of development). But slightly interesting doesn't equal necessary, and Dourif's character is even given the weakest, most pointless send-off of any of the film's characters.
The makeup effects of the creature are acceptable, I guess, but we are never given much of a good look at it. But, for the most part, the film's gore quotient, one of the reasons people would show up to these films, is pretty limited. And there is certainly no tension, scares or suspense to speak of. Never once was I concerned for anyone on screen, and there is a jump scare or two, but nothing remarkable, and many of them are predictable.
Graveyard Shift was released in 1990, at the end of the horror film era of the previous two decades, before the genre would go into remission for a few years before being re-born with the self referential Scream series followed by Hollywood's brief dalliance with J-Horror. And frankly, if Graveyard Shift is representative of what the genre brought to the table, then it was deserving of being buried.
Set in a cotton mill in what I guess is supposed to be Maine (one character references Castle Rock, King's well known fictional Maine town), Graveyard Shift begins with a character who likes to shoot rats with rocks being attacked by . . . something . . . and then dying in the cotton picker. Into town walks John Hall (Dave Andrews) a drifter looking for work, who lands a job at the mill, under the direction of the rather unkind, and potentially unhinged, foreman, Warwick (Stephen Macht). Warwick is a rather despicable character, using the female employees to fulfill his sexual needs while trying to cut a few bucks here and there in regards to worker safety. When he is ordered to clean up the basement or be shut down, he recruits several of the plant workers for the job, but they quickly realize that there is . . . something . . . down there in the basement with them.
Graveyard Shift is the kind of film that used to be cranked out in the 1970s and 80s by major studios, I suspect, because they were cheap to make and even with a lower than average box office compared to major films, they still managed to turn a decent profit for the studio. Because it is almost certain no one was greenlighting Graveyard Shift because it promised to be a good movie. And a good movie is definitely not what director Ralph S. Singleton and screenwriter Jon Esposito have supplied. There is nothing of value in Graveyard Shift. The characters are almost exclusively ciphers, existing for no other reason than to be picked off one by one by the film's creature that lives in the mill. Main character John Hall has no development to speak of, and the attempt by the filmmakers to create a relationship between him and female worker Jane (Kelly Wolf) is dead on arrival. Neither character is interesting, or heck, even really present, other than to serve as something for the camera to be focused on most of the time.
Stephen Macht provides a seemingly hissable villain in the form of Warwick, but he is almost completely a caricature, a creation of the screenplay to give us someone to root against, not a three dimensional character. When he goes off his rocker towards the end of the film, it is completely out of left field, not something that has been building throughout the narrative. The only character who is even vaguely interesting is the exterminator called in to deal with the rat problem at the mill, played by Brad Dourif. His exterminator holds a personal vendetta against rats due to their use in torture when he was in Vietnam (and I wonder if some material intended for his character was transplanted to Warwick at some point in the re-write stage of development). But slightly interesting doesn't equal necessary, and Dourif's character is even given the weakest, most pointless send-off of any of the film's characters.
The makeup effects of the creature are acceptable, I guess, but we are never given much of a good look at it. But, for the most part, the film's gore quotient, one of the reasons people would show up to these films, is pretty limited. And there is certainly no tension, scares or suspense to speak of. Never once was I concerned for anyone on screen, and there is a jump scare or two, but nothing remarkable, and many of them are predictable.
Graveyard Shift was released in 1990, at the end of the horror film era of the previous two decades, before the genre would go into remission for a few years before being re-born with the self referential Scream series followed by Hollywood's brief dalliance with J-Horror. And frankly, if Graveyard Shift is representative of what the genre brought to the table, then it was deserving of being buried.