Macabre…ish Horror Review: Graveyard Shift

Graveyard Shift, 1990/ 1 hr 49 min

A rat infested mill has recently reopened and Jason Reed (Jonathan Emerson) is working the night shift. There are so many rats surrounding him that he starts tossing them in the picker and is attacked by an unseen monster and himself is pushed in an torn to shreds only to be eaten by the rats.

Later, an eccentric exterminator, Tucker Cleveland (Brad Dourif) is called in by the new foreman, a lecherous sadist, Warwick (Stephen Macht). One of the great ideas the exterminator has is vacuuming the rats out of the basement and blasting them into a nearby waterway.

The foreman is warned that the infestation is too bad and the mill should be reshuttered but he's determined. A crew is hired to empty the basement. One is a drifter, John Halł, who is hired to replace Reed, to run the picker one the night shift.

As the work begins in the basement, people start to disappear and as they disappear they just hire another body for the position. The foreman also likes to promote women he does like to his assistant position, which includes performing on his couch, three times a week.

And everyone the foreman doesn't like or women he's done with, he puts in the basement on the clean up crew. If you complain, you're fire. They have a week to clean the basement out, at twice the pay and all they have to do is survive an obscene amount of rats and a monster!

This movie is based on a Stephen King story and I kept confusing it with The Mangler. It has that Jaws feel, the rats are real and the physical effects are pretty good and bloody. Good cast, Andrew Divoff, Kelly Wolf, Jimmy Wolf and Vic Polizos are also in this flick. Nice deaths but not very graphic, they don't show everything and a fair amount of jump scares. I enjoyed this one!

P. S. There's a lot of yelling and screaming in this one, mostly man screaming.