Stephen King adaptations are a mixed bag. Of course there are the Shinings and Carries out there. But there are also some pretty horrid ones as well. Somewhere in the middle is a purgatory of mediocre and forgettable adaptations of King's work. Graveyard Shift probably belongs somewhere there.
A young drifter comes upon a small southern town that appears to only have a diner and a rat infested textile mill. There have been some strange happenings surrounding the mill. Workers are disappearing with seemingly no trace. The drifter asks for work and is offered a job by Warwick, the antagonistic foreman. Not long after, Warwick asks the drifter to join a cleanup crew to fix up the mill's basement. What they find below may just explain why the mill is hiring so frequently...oh! And the rat infestation.
Brad Dourif (Child's Play) has a supporting role as a Vietnam vet exterminator. Together with Warwick they are probably the only memorable characters of the entire film. Our protagonist spends the majority of the movie flinging Diet Pepsi cans at rats with a slingshot. You read that right. Warwick is such an asshole that you're just counting the seconds to his inevitable death (Which is pretty much the same death suffered by someone else earlier. Disappointing.) Dourif plays his character very over the top. The character doesn't seem to serve much purpose other than to give Dourif a job and add to the body count, though.
In the original King short story, there is an entire mutated race of rats that prey upon the cleanup crew. In this film adaptation there is only one. It appears to be a giant bat. I can only say that much because it has wings. The special effects used for this creature are just a mess. It's features are borderline unidentifiable. The film also refuses to show the entire creature, presumably because the final sculpt or whatever was just such a downright blob of shit with wings. There is a little bit of gore as well, but it's nothing special.
The high points come when Warwick and The Drifter finally duke it out in the tunnels below. Their battleground is an over the top pile of human remains. These two beat each other to hell and back using human bones as weaponry. Warwick himself, plays the fight like a professional wrestler as he executed a huge dive from the top of a pile of bones. He can also be seen overselling a strike to the face with a bone that sends him flying a good 5 or so feet.
Graveyard Shift could have been a lot worse though. I wouldn't recommend putting on for a night of spine tingling frights or anything. It's pretty much your average cheesy creature feature. If you have some friends over, surely they'll get a kick out of crazy Brad Dourif and the fight scene near the end. If you're trying to find some actually frightening Stephen King material you might want to look elsewhere.
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