Harefooted Halloween: Graveyard Shift

What I Liked: I really dig the nasty ass production design (Gary Wissner (Last Man Standing, I Know What You Did Last Summer)) and set decoration (George R. Nelson (Apocalypse Now, Big Trouble in Little China)).  Even though they did a bunch of filming in a real textile mill from the early 1800’s they amped up almost every environment on screen to be filthy as fuck.  Not only is there grime, cobwebs and trash strewn about but there are also puddles of muddy gross water, moisture dripping from the ceilings and pools of blood red water.   As if that wasn’t enough this takes place during the summer so it’s like a hundred degrees in the mill.  All the workers are sweating profusely, have greasy hair and sooty faces.  Lastly, the fantastic decrepit graveyard next door continues the theme by being waterlogged and overgrown with weeds.  A layer of fog in most locations pushes the sinister haunted house vibes over the top.  This is one of the most surface level disgusting goddamn films I’ve ever set eyes on.

Most of the acting isn’t anything to write home about except for two performances.  One is the rat exterminator played by Brad Dourif (Child’s Play 2) who gets pleasure out of his work.  Dourif is always excellent and he brings his usual intensity with a particularly strange scene where he delivers a lengthy monologue about the Viet Cong torturing prisoners of war with live hungry rats.  The other standout is the mill foreman, Warwick, played by Stephen Macht (The Monster Squad).  He’s a mean sonuvabitch who doesn’t give a shit about his workers or the conditions they toil in.  He’ll fire someone on the spot over nothing with a cold delivery.  Naturally he’s a creep as well who tries to get in the pants of the women who work at the mill.  And his Maine accent, man, that accent.  It’s the same exaggerated one that Fred Gwynne sports in Pet Sematary that pop culture loved to make fun of in the 90’s.  I can’t really describe it but it’s unique, instantly recognizable, pretty funny sounding and pretty distracting.  Anyway, Warwick doesn’t totally make sense as a character.  If he were simply a rough boss that would be one thing but when people start dying he just doesn’t care.  It’s beyond being self-centered because towards the end he completely loses his mind and fights off others who try to help him when he gets injured.  Maybe he had a mental break.  I dunno, even though Warwick feels nonsensical Macht chews that scenery right up making him by far the most entertaining character in the piece.

When we finally get to see the creature that’s been lurking in the basement of the mill it looks damn nice.  I don’t think this is much of a spoiler that it’s a massive ten foot long rat/bat thing.  The puppet/animatronic they built is like if a rat survived a nuclear war with its white eyes, gnarly grotesque skin, barbed hair and enormous claws.  With all the quick cutting we never get a great look at it though which is a shame because I would’ve loved to have soaked this beast in more.  Perhaps the thing didn’t look as good as I think it does so the filmmakers decided to cut around it.  Or it could’ve been they only got a small amount of usable footage and had to make the most of it.  Either way I like this guy.

Kickass title.  And I appreciate that some of the mill workers do in fact work the graveyard shift.  Now, the graveyard situated next door is pure coincidence as far as I can tell, however, what’s underneath it does add an extra layer of meaning.

What I Didn’t Like: Not the best script.  There’s very little story which amounts to a drifter blowing into a small town to work at a textile mill only to discover his boss is a psycho and something’s killing the workers.  Everyone is fairly one dimensional including the protagonist (David Andrews (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)) who’s incredibly bland and has maybe two pages of dialogue total in the entire movie.  There are head scratching parts too like the scene where Warwick asks the exterminator to set rat traps in the graveyard for some reason (does the mill own the graveyard?).  Through sheer dumb luck the exterminator gets killed totally by accident but it’s setup like Warwick knew this was going to happen somehow?  Some of these shortcomings could be chalked up to this being based on a short story (by Stephen King) so they didn’t have a ton to work with.  At the same time the picture isn’t remarkably well written in general.

Similar to the above the editing is clumsy at times.  A couple of scenes end awkwardly and there are occasional fades to black that make it seem like a TV movie.

Overall Impressions: While this isn’t anything amazing there’s definitely a fun time to be had here.  As long as you don’t expect too much and are down with a giant creature munching on some dudes this can deliver a few gasps and chuckles, especially if you don’t like rats.  Personally, I don’t have that fear (although I wouldn’t love to encounter a thousand of them…or one very large one for that matter), but I do fucking hate spiders (and bugs in general) so in that sense this one is in the same vein as Arachnophobia.  You know, a film that puts a common phobia of a specific animal or insect into overdrive.  And you get a kick out of it because it’s the fear juice that excites.  It might be worth your time if that sounds up your alley.