La creatura del cimitero

Truthfully, the production isn't so bad (no worse than most King adaptations) and the direction is rather passable. The bug, like in most bad films, is the script.

With such a strong cast and good production values, this should have been a great film.

But somehow the story bogs down at the beginning, more interested in the terrible management of an old mill than the giant monster in the basement. The story makes a play at being true to the source while making a statement but by the last 30 minutes it suddenly remembers that it's a horror movie and tries to stuff the denouement and everything else into a few rushed scenes. The monster, which was actually quite good, doesn't even get time to breathe.

Brad Dourif does his best to save the movie, playing a creepy exterminator with a Jeffery Combs style mania (if the two of them were ever in a movie, the world would explode from the awesome).

But in the end this film had everything, from a giant bat to a good cast, and it still sucked.

I love the atmospheric setting for Graveyard Shift, a run down, rat-infested textile mill built over a network of tunnels and next to a cemetery. I love rodents: I used to own a lovely pair of white rats. I like bats (which are essentially flying rodents). And I like the rat/bat monster in Graveyard Shift, which isn't nearly as bad as some of the reviews here would have you believe.

What I don't like about this film, however, are the people. Drifter John Hall (David Andrews) makes for a bland hero, mill foreman Warwick (Stephen Macht) is an obnoxious bastard with a really annoying accent, Brad Dourif as The Exterminator is way too over the top (even by Brad's standards), and Andrew Divoff and Vic Polizos are terrible as Hall's co-workers Danson and Brogan, the latter almost making me switch off as he blasts rats with a high pressure hose (not because I felt for the rats, but because he screams at the top of his voice with each blast. Very irritating!).

Super cringe-worthy scenes include Warwick suddenly going nutzoid, smearing his face with dirt and acting like Rambo, and Danson suddenly breaking down in hysterics. Still, with a decent creature (I've seen plenty worse) and a fair amount of gore, Graveyard Shift is still worth a look, especially for Stephen King fans, on whose short story the film is based.

5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for the so-bad-it's-brilliant end credits song that is comprised of snippets of dialogue from the film set to a cheesy backing track.

Bland David Andrews is a quiet hunk drifter who starts the late shift at a grimy Maine textile mill, headed over by a sadistic sleazeball boss (Stephen Macht). The basement work crew start falling prey to a giant rat monster that lurks underground. Real rats are all over the place too, to clean up the bodies.

The gore FX are mostly top-notch, the sets are good and there's plenty of violence and action, but this pointless movie is one big, unpleasant cliché thanks to poor direction and scripting (by John Esposito, based on the Stephen King story). Everyone yells and screams a lot, but Kelly Wolf (as a tough female worker who can hold her own) and Brad Dourif (as 'Nam vet pest exterminator Tucker Cleveland) are the only two who bring any spark to their roles.

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift is curiously one of my favourite adaptations of his work. I say curiously because it's not a very tasteful film, let alone even a good one. It's simple schlock and awe, goo and slime for 90 minutes straight, every human character either an unsettling nutcase or cardboard stock archetype. There's just something so Midnite Movie- esque about it though, a sense of fun to its gigantic, hollowed out mess of a textile mill in which some kind of vile denizen stalks a night crew that pretty much deserves everything they get. People wander about, squabble and are picked off in ways that get steadily more gruesome until the final reveal of the monster in some overblown puss-palooza of a finale. What more do you need in your bottom feeder helping of horror? Steven Macht is the sleazebag who runs the mill at his tyrannical whim, while David Andrews is the closest thing you'll find to a stoic protagonist. Andrew 'Wishmaster' Divoff shows up as a stock character, but it's Brad Dourif who chews scenery and ends up the only memorable person as the world's most simultaneously intense and incompetent exterminator, a bug eyed little weirdo who freaks people out with extended monologues about Viet Nam when he should be perusing corridors to find whatever's lurking there. The monster itself, if I remember correctly, is one big pile of grossly misshappen, poopy prosthetic puppetry, as is often the case in early 90's King fare. Would you want it any other way? Simple, efficient and impressively gory is what you'll find on this shift.

Films like this one were released by the bucket load in the 1980's, but as 1990 approached; they became less and less common. Still, there are a lot of silly horror flicks that were released in the 90's debut year, and, surprisingly, this one isn't all that bad. It lacks all the elements that make great films great films, of course; things such as brains, coherency and any whisper of characters has been neglected in favour of monster special effects and a few nice death scenes; but seriously, that's all you want from a film like this, so to say that Graveyard Shift does it's job isn't wrong. The film is based on a short story by Stephen King. Nearly everything that King has ever touched has been turned into a film, with a lot of mixed results. I would put this one in the middling category, which isn't a bad place to be in considering all the failed adaptations. The plot is typically thin (it is a SHORT story!) and it follows a man who gets a job in a cotton mill. The place is infested with rats, and after being charged with cleaning the place up, our hero finds a trapdoor and soon he and his team are up against the reason rats have made their home in the mill...

One thing that really stands out about this film is the atmosphere. Director Ralph S. Singleton delights in presenting a fetid and disturbing aura around the central location, and this helps the story massively and gives the film an almost 'odyssey' approach when the characters finally make their way underground. I don't find rats scary, personally, but many people do and this film could easily be a reason why! The way that the rats surround the characters is brooding and frightening and provides the film with one of it's key elements. Acting definitely isn't a key element of Graveyard Shift, but the appearance of popular cult actor Brad Dourif will please many of this films' audience. I'm not a massive of fan of Dourif personally, but I respect his ability to shine in campy productions. The story doesn't offer anything in the way of a point, and it's incoherency will annoy many - but if you go into this film with the right sort of expectations, and don't think you're about to see a horror classic, Graveyard Shift really shouldn't disappoint.