The Graveyard Shift (Singleton 1990)

Before I embarked on this review of the film The Graveyard Shift (Singleton 1990), I decided to go back and reread the Stephen King short story upon which the film is based. The story of the same name is featured in King’s compilation of short stories titled Night Shift, and was originally published by itself in 1970, long before King hit the big time and became not just a famous writer, but a brand of horror.

The short story is not one of King’s better works, though considered in the context of the early years of his career, it does offer insight into how he has developed as a writer. The story is focused on the tension between a drifter named Hall and the foreman at a textile mill where Hall is currently employed. Over the course of a few days working the graveyard shift as part of a clean up crew, the tensions build into a murderous rage which explodes in a mysterious subbasement where rats have not only been breeding, but have mutated into hideous, man-eating monsters.

The story is slight in plot, character, and thematic complexity, but King’s distinctive voice is in full force in the story, as he blends Edgar Allen Poe style horror with the pulpier fare of the classic EC comics. As such, “The Graveyard Shift” might have worked as a short film, and would have been right at home as part of a Creepshow sequel. As the basis for a feature film however, it is hard to see what could be done to stretch the material beyond the twenty minute mark. That Ralph S. Singleton’s film works at all is a miracle, but is doesn’t change the fact that the finished film is a failure overall, never finding an strong enough approach to adapt the material for feature length.

As in the short story the film is based on, the film focuses on a drifter named Hall (David Andrews, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003]), who arrives in a town where the only work to be found is at the local textile mill owned by Warwick (Stephen Macht, whose credits mostly seem to be from television), a greedy and corrupt man who has no problems with extorting labour and other favours out of his employees. While Hall strikes up a romance with his co-worker Jane (Kelly Wolf, Less Than Zero [1987]) and makes enemies with other locals, Warwick is faced with the threat of his mill being shut down due to various building and health code violations. Bribing his way into getting extra time to clean the place up, Warwick drafts Hall and Jane into the graveyard shift clean up crew. As tensions heighten amongst the crew, people start to disappear and a mysterious subbasement is discovered. Does the subbasement have anything to do with the mill’s massive rat population? Only a trip down holds the answers.

While the film takes the general premise of the short story, it abandons the short story’s focus upon the mental state of Hill and his murderous rage against Warwick. The relationship between the two this time out is more clean cut: Hill is decent average-Joe here, while Warwick has been transformed from an inept boss who likes to lord his limited power over people into a cartoon-ish villain, openly and knowingly playing God with people’s lives through running the town's only source of employment. In place of this missing psychological thrust, the film instead chooses to reflect on the recession era America it was produced in (which does allow the film to feel oddly timely with the current recession), with the presence of the rats scourging for scraps mirroring the desperation of the town folk in need of work, and their willingness to do whatever it takes to even just get a scrap.

It is this sense of working class desperation and impoverishment that the film captures perfectly, at least in the production design and photography. The town in this film is a decaying rural hell, mixing dilapidated industrial structures with just enough gothic elements without going overboard. The film is successful enough in creating its impoverished world that by the time the monster bats and rats come out to play, their existence seems almost natural.

Unfortunately, the production design and photography is about all that works in the film. With our characters reduced to stock types of hero/villain/hero’s girlfriend/etc., it is natural to assume the filmmakers would be to amp up the man vs. monster rat action. The film though is structured like a slow burn horror film, focused on character and punctuated with moments of jump scares. The problem is that there is nothing to burn here: we know the direction the film is heading from the moment it begins, and in the absence of well rounded characters, the film feels padded as it delays the inevitable (or, more precisely, the predictable), with repetitive scenes and odd tangents that go nowhere.

Take the character of Tucker Cleveland, the exterminator who we see working on the rat problem in the mill. As played by sci-fi and horror genre veteran actor Brad Dourif (Dune [1984]; Heaven’s Gate [1980]), the character is bizarre creation with no basis in King’s story, rambling on about Vietnam and the pleasures of his job. The character is one of the most entertaining elements in the film, but at the same time, one that is indicative of the film’s problems: he does not really have much of a place in the film. He adds nothing to the narrative, and if his scenes were deleted, they would have no impact upon the finished film. I love a good tangent, and as it stands, I am happy that these scenes are in the film,as Dourif is always a joy to watch, but the character is a clear indicator for the amount of padding included in the finished film.

The film’s best weapon in combating boredom however is Stephen Macht, who in his villainous role decides to chew as much scenery as possible. As noted, the character isn’t even remotely close to being anything more than a caricature of an evil boss, but Macht clearly enjoys every sleazy moment he is given to play, especially when his character (SPOILERS) is allowed to go completely crazy at the film’s conclusion. (END SPOILERS) Part of this enjoyment comes simply from the fact that Hall by contrast is such a blank slate of a lead character, which is in no way the fault of actor David Andrews, who gives a fine performance. The material Andrews is given is simply limited, and it is hard to imagine any actor being able to make anything out of the character. Fairing even worse is Kelly Wolf, who has absolutely nothing to do throughout the whole film.

Most disappointing however is the film’s climax in the subbasement, as the characters start to behave irrationally, and the final confrontation with our monstrous bat/rat thing is given the short end of the stick after an entire film’s builds up. The direction is haphazard and the sequence is poorly edited, undermining any possible tension and ending the film on a somewhat sour note. I understand trying to keep a monster in the shadows, but when your film is about a giant mutant bat/rat, then the expectation is that the audience will see it head on at least once. As it stands, the limited presence of the monster seems to be motivated by a lack of adequate special effects rather than any artistic reason.

While Graveyard Shift is a disappointment and should not be at the top of anyone’s Halloween viewing list, the film does hold a small amount of charm and some treats for horror film fans, including an early performance from Andrew Divoff of Wishmaster (1997) fame. Furthermore, it can at least be said that it is not the worst film ever produced based on a Stephen King work, and for those who make it to the end of the film, the closing credit’s music is cool and catchy. If you are holding a marathon of films based on the works of Stephen King, you could do worse than slapping Graveyard Shift in the middle of the pack. Just don't kick off or end the marathon with the film.

Child's Play (Holland 1988)

(Once again, this move is delaying EVERYTHING. However, GOOD NEWS! I now have employment in my field! That wont start for a while, but while I get prepped for that, and continue to work on this move, I offer another "classic" review from my Facebook/Live Journal period)


I think I have to come up with a new term for talking about Child’s Play (Holland 1988), and the best I can think of is accidental film. An accidental film is a film that is a success despite the fact that various problems during the production process should have resulted in the final product being a complete failure. Child’s Play is an accidental film, one that should require any viewer of the film to watch the special features in order to see how several different sets of intentions formed the finished film.

Let me back up a bit, as my context for viewing Child’s Play is a little odd. I had known that the film was about a child who ends up with a doll possessed by the soul of a killer, a solid B-film idea. However, before going into the film, I had also read an interview with Don Mancini, who originated the idea for the film and wrote the initial drafts, where he offhandedly mentioned that his original concept for the film had the doll being the id of the central child, as opposed to the soul of the killer. Interested on how the original concept could evolve into what was in the finished film, I decided that it might finally be time to check it out, especially with the new DVD that had been recently released.

Furthermore, the film is directed by Tom Holland, who directed a fantastic homage to eras of horror gone by in Fright Night (1985). Holland also wrote the screenplay to Psycho II (Franklin 1983), which is a film that is better than it has any right to be. Holland’s involvement was enough to push me over the edge into checking out Child’s Play.

Ultimately, Child’s Play proves to be is a film that is at war with itself. On one hand, you have a film about a child’s need for friendship, and how toy companies prey upon this need. On the other hand, you have a film about a serial killer who was trained in voodoo and uses it to cheat death in order to get back at those who killed him. Conceivably, there should be a way that these two premises could fit together, but more often than not they seem to be at odds. Furthermore, while the film features some clever writing, directing, and subtlety which is unexpected for a film about a killer doll, the film is also filled with moments of equally bad writing, with more than a few groan inducing lines and some poorly conceived scenes which are directed in such an over the top way as to make the viewer laugh, and not intentionally.

But somehow, the film still seems to work.

Take the opening scenes of the film. It begins with the final moments of killer Charles Lee Ray’s life (Brad Dourif, who also voices Chucky later in the film and in the future instalments), as he is abandoned by his partner, chased into a toy store by Officer Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon), and is bleeding to death from a gun shot. Coming across a Good Guy doll, Ray recites a voodoo enchantment which places his soul in a doll. However, the scene in which Ray passes his soul on is executed in an over the top fashion: a storm cloud gathers overhead, and lightning strikes down to complete the process, causing a minor explosion in the process. The whole sequence is a bizarre combination of overdone cop and criminal confrontation clichés with magic spells, setting the viewer up for an entirely different film.

Cut to the introduction of Andy (Alex Vincent). The scene follows Andy as he watches the Good Guys animated television series and makes breakfast, burning toast and causing a general mess as any young kid would. The scene is well constructed, playing with the audience’s lack of knowledge at this point: who is this kid and why is he performing these tasks by himself? Where are the adults? It turns out that Andy is in fact making breakfast-in-bed for his mother, belying the initial impressions of a problematic situation with the seemingly harmless childhood event.

However, the filmmakers complicate the matters through the Good Guys cartoon Andy watches. It is an insidious bit of animation and live action advertisement, in which a one of the Good Guys promises to be the friend of a child on the show before it slips into an advertisement for the Good Guy dolls, which promises similar types of adventure and companionship. The ad is a deft bit of filmmaking, subtly suggesting what Andy really wants in his desire of the doll, and starts what should be the heart of the film: a critique of children’s entertainment and toys which prey upon their insecurities.

Watching these two sequences back to back, it is surprising to see that they seem to belong to the same film, each demonstrating two entirely different sets of sensibilities, both in subject matter and formal approach. Of course, the opening sequence could have worked as a fake out, setting the audience expectations up only to deliver a different film. However the rest of Child’s Play bounces back and forth between these two different stories and approaches before jarringly trying to bring them together in a bizarre third act, which works about as well as one might expect. It is like Frankenstein’s monster: all the pieces are there, but do they really seem to go together? At best, the function well enough.

What is frustrating is that buried in this Frankenstein is a much more cohesive and thematically thought out film, and the DVD confirms as such as Mancini runs through what his original screenplay had been, seemingly a horror film/satire by way of the Paul Verhoeven /Edward Neumeier collaborations. While Mancini enjoys the finished film and praises it and his collaborators, in watching the documentaries on the film one cannot help but get annoyed at producer David Kirschner, who forced the serial killer/voodoo material into the film. Holland, who is more o less absent save archive material from the DVD, seems to have been interested in an entirely different approach himself, looking to make a more emotional film about the broken family. At least these family elements work along with the original intent of the film rather than come out of a different film altogether. With these different directions though, it is harder to give credit to anyone on the film for the elements that surprisingly work.

Case in point: I was ready before watching the special features to praise the filmmakers for allowing the audience to work by themselves to have to put together the details of Andy’s situation and his loneliness. The film never belabours the point of Andy’s loneliness, instead requiring the viewer to pay attention and make the connections. However, the DVD features then reveal that over half an hour was cut out of the film before release, none which is provided on the disc, leaving me to wonder if the filmmakers at one time did have material that made explicit what now remains implicit. In other words, are some of these aspects of the film sheer accidents? I’m not sure. Most certainly, it does not matter in the final product, but it leaves the viewer with the feeling that the whole film was a mess that just managed to work out well enough to leave a lasting impression.

At the end of it all, I am willing to recommend Child’s Play as more an oddity than a great film. It is fun, but when it is over, there is a chance that you will be more interested in the possible remake than this finished film, at least if Mancini returns to his original concept. I know I am.