Stephen King's Graveyard Shift

IT'S NOT REALLY THAT BAD
Graveyard Shift is always high on the list of bad Stephen King films but I don't think it's all that bad. I have the advantage of never having read the story so I have no point of reference to compare it to, which helps I think. As most King movies do, this one is set in Maine, Gates Falls specifically. David Andrews is John Hall, a drifter who blows into town, looking for work. Well there's basically just one business to work at, and that's the old, decrepit textile mill that pretty much supports the town.

The mill is run by the hard-nosed, and sadistic Warwick (Stephen Macht) who hires Andrews to run a machine that can only be run at night due to the high summer heat. Andrews is alone in a dingy, dungeon of a room running his machine and encountering rats...lots of rats that even get inside the bags of cotton he's loading into the machine. Here he meets Tucker the exterminator, played by Brad Douriff with his usual flair for offbeat characters.

Soon...

Very strange
This movie is made rather half-heartedly, but it wallows so deep in the strange and disgusting that a fan of the horror genre can't help but be intrigued. It is based very loosely on Stephen King's story out of Night Shift. Its about a drifter who gets a job at an old mill where a bizarre death has just occured. The foreman is a sleazy adulterer who sleeps with his lady employees. The drifter falls for one of them and they become good friends. When one of the secretaries finds out she was put on cleanup, she trashes the foreman's car. Drifter stops the foreman from hitting the woman and the foreman asigns him to cleanup to take her place. That is when the party really gets started. The movie is by all means horrible, but it is still incredibly entertaining. It has no logic and the story is par at best, but you feel so compelled to watch it because it does hook you. Wich is why this is still one of my favorite horror movies. Look out for Brad Douriff as the exterminator.

Okay little b-movie.
Bachman (get it?) Mills has a rat problem. A really BIG rat problem. Get it?

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift is one of those movies some people think Stephen King had something to do with. Kind of like John Carpenter had something to do with John Carpenter's Halloween. But Maine's #1 Horror Writer (oh, excuse me, "American Novelist") had nothing whatsoever to do with this movie, outside of demanding that it be shot in Maine, so his home state could get a little extra income. The meaning of the title is not dissimilar to Bram Stoker's Dracula or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The movie does draw a commendable amount from the source story (there's a crappy boss named Warwick, a fire hose is used to squirt rats to oblivion, and there's a giant monster rat, and a mill), so King had no legal ground to have his name removed, as he has done with the movie Stephen King's [NOT] The Lawnmower Man. Not that he wanted to, as it is Graveyard Shift is a dopy piece of b-movie...

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