MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Graveyard’ Deserves an Early Burial

“Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift” (citywide) is set in the most derelict, ominous textile mill you could ever hope to see. The ramshackle machinery is strictly early Industrial Revolution, and the place is overrun by more rats than in “Willard” and “Ben” combined. Where is Norma Rae when we need her?

As it turns out, the mill is all that this piece of silly horror schlock has going for it. Skilled production designer Gary Wissner persuades us that the mill, an actual abandoned site in Maine, has endless mine tunnels beneath it and even a cavern stacked with skeletons--the perfect habitat for a dinosaur-sized rat.

This picture, which looks far, far better than it is, is so clunky that you can’t be sure just how funny writer John Esposito, in adapting an early King short story, and director Ralph S. Singleton intended it to be. (It hasn’t remotely the sophisticated tone of “Alligator,” a much better monster movie.) In any event, it plays like a crude burlesque, so numskull that the over-the-top performances of Stephen Macht, affecting a terrible phony New England accent as the mill’s Simon Legree foreman, and Brad Dourif as a spacey rat exterminator are actually welcome. The thankless straight roles go to David Andrews and Kelly Wolf as two decent young people so down on their luck they have to go to work for Macht. At 86 minutes, “Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift” (rated R for considerable gore) plays as if it has been pruned considerably.