Down in the deep south amidst the hot and hazy heat waves, sits the old Bachman Mill. Now the mill is a cotton refinery an old textile mill, if you will. The midnight shift or the graveyard shift is operated by a skeleton crew, just enough to keep it going. This is where we meet John Hall, a young drifter who gets hired on to work with the crew. The plant which is infested with rats also harbors something much larger, deep in it's cotton filled bowels, something that wants to come up to the surface. The crew of the graveyard shift are about to come face to face with what’s underneath the factory.

Another movie based on a story by Stephen King, but does it fall in the good or bad area?

The setting of the mill is done very well, however I never buy the huge underground network or catacombs that exist in these kind of movies, you know the ones where you could walk down into the gloom forever and find a lost civilization or forgotten sewer network. But the mill does seem to make you sweat just by watching the screen, it is that hot and stuffy. So I give a thumbs up to the set of Bachman Mills (Do ya get the name pun?).

There is one great performance by horror and sci-fi vet Brad Dourif. Dourif plays Tucker Cleveland the mill's rat exterminator and he is brilliant. My favorite scene is Cleveland telling of the horrors of huge Vietnamese rats and their peculiar appetites. The character of Warwick the manager is also fairly entertaining and even the Djinn, Andrew Divinoff himself makes an appearance in the film, so I give the cast a thumbs up as well.

The effects and the creatures, however, are pretty damn lousy, especially the big old mama that our heroes Cleveland and Hall face down at the end. The deeper you go into the factory, apparently the bigger and more bizarre the rats that dwell there get. But on the downside as we go from live rats at the top we go to horrible puppets and cheap animatronics at the bottom. So the effects get a big thumbs down.

Graveyard Shift isn't horrible, it just seemed to come out in the decade between 85 and 95 when anything with the name Stephen King on it was getting made into a miniseries of movie, and it kinda got lost in the middle. But it's worth a look see.

4/10