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tonight's feature: Graveyard Shift (1990) on Max
(SPOILERS!) Another Stephen King short-story-turned-feature-length film, Graveyard Shift sounds like it's about some spooky graveyard crew getting haunted by the supernatural. Instead, it's about the world's worst rat infestation in the basement of the world's shittiest textile mill with the world's shittiest, most abusive foreman.
Set somewhere in Butthole, Maine, a widowed drifter rolls into town and takes a shitty job at the impossibly shitty textile mill. A few people die there mysteriously but no one even seems to notice. The jerky foreman (who is coincidentally banging the female workers in full violation of HR policy) decides to buy off the local inspector for a few months so they can stay open, despite having too many rats to flush a toilet and a massive fire hazard in the basement. His exterminator (played gleefully by acting legend Brad Dourif) can't even seem to keep up with the rat infestation. Jerky foreman forces a handful of employees to clean out said basement and eventually we find out there is a massive, cow-sized, pissed off queen mega-rat (with wings) eating people in a second, even lower basement, which leads to some underground tunnels, a river or two and what looks like 1,000 years of human bones.
One by one these hapless, small town cretins get gobbled up or shredded by the rat queen, which causes Jerky Foreman to go full Vietnam vet apeshit, eventually attacking our hero and his barely-there love interest. There's a big fight scene and one guy loses and the other guy escapes and the rat queen gets ground up in a cotton picker / giant machine thanks to a slingshot and an old diet pepsi can. The end.
I don't know how they got these rats to "act" in the movie but some of them definitely deserve tiny oscars. Significantly better than the last Stephen King flick I watched, somehow I didn't mind this being on the dumber scale of things. 6 rat sandwiches out of 10.
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