Is Pepsi okay?
Graveyard Shift is one of those adaptations that scrabbles through the grime of Stephen King’s short fiction and comes up clutching a big, sweaty clump of creature feature pulp. It’s not really a faithful translation of King’s moody, rat-infested morality tale so much as cheap and cheerless cash-in monster movie a decade or so out of time. Saying that, there’s a scrappy, unpretentious charm to its midnight-movie energy that makes it worth a watch, even if it’ll take a few beers and, for preference, a lukewarm half-eaten kebab sitting in your lap to fully appreciate it.
When drifter John Hall (David Andrews) gets a job with the graveyard shift at a decrepit Maine textile mill, he’s assigned the task of helping to clear out the basement; the latest front in an going war with the resident rat population that even eccentric exterminator Tucker Cleveland (Brad Dourif) can’t seem to win. The mill is overseen by despotic foreman Warwick, played with ham-greased relish by Stephen Macht, who’s desperate to keep the mill open despite the OSHA violations, and runs a neat little sideline in sexual harassment.
Graveyard Shift takes the bones of King’s original story and stuffs them with rubber, slime, and noise. The original story’s slow disintegration of people, work, and purpose is largely consumed by the film’s appetite for spectacle. While Macht’s performance as Warwick is the film’s true monster: loud, sleazy, and unrepentantly awful, what was once a nasty little treatise on neglect and the inhuman machinery of labour becomes a splatter showcase where “vermin” refers more to the production design than the metaphor. Still, there’s satisfaction to be had in the film’s single-minded devotion to its monster. Ralph S Singleton, in his feature debut and swansong, stages his subterranean showdown with the sort of practical gusto that defined late-era drive-in horror: half ingenuity, half rubber creatures, and a hundred percent sticky.
Graveyard Shift is less an evolution of King’s work for the screen and more of a mutation, a stunted branching destined for a Darwinian end. It jettisons much of the author’s favoured themes and motifs, stripping away the psychological, moral, and even supernatural subtexts in favour of wet, loud, cryptid action – but at least it seems to be enjoying itself while it does it. Criticising it for being a bad Stephen King movie is a bit like mocking a greasy burger for not being fine dining. On its own low-budget terms, it’s a creature feature that delivers the splatter, and the sheer physicality of its effects work: a blend of rat puppets, copious slime, and amusingly visible strings makes you yearn for simpler times when suspension of disbelief was something you had to put effort into, meeting the effects halfway.
Graveyard Shift’s most enduring strength is that it’s an unpretentious late-night, beer-in-hand spectacle of blue-collar horror. There are better King adaptations, and there are worse monster movies, but few that wear their trashy credentials with such proud, sweaty sincerity.
