Film Reviews by BG

When dealing with King adaptations it's best to go in with low expectations. Few directors know how to handle the material just right. When they do (The Mist/Christine/Carrie) it makes for film alchemy. More often than not, you end up with a confused film that's largely a mess until the killing starts.

That about sums up Graveyard Shift. It wants to be a serious horror, but the plotting is too weak, the characters too juvenile and thinly drawn, and the effects too hit and miss to give a consistently exciting movie. What we get are the usual King tropes - a worn-down hero (David Andrews) takes on a tough job at a similarly worn down textile mill in a poverty stricken town. There he meets a girl (Kelly Wolf - feisty enough to be interesting) and angers the corrupt and dangerous manager (Stephen Macht, playing bad guy Warwick with an odd accent, a blend of cunning and violence, and looking confusingly like actor Fred Ward).

The mill is utterly infested with rats, and in a rush to avoid being shut down, Warwick cajoles some of his least liked employees into cleaning out the cavernous and biblically filthy basement over a sweltering holiday weekend.

It's then that they realise something nastier than Warwick lives on the premises...

With Andrew Divoff and Brad Dourif (as a quirky exterminator) rounding out the cast this could have been an astounding film. Unfortunately at this time studios viewed King's back catalogue as a gold mine for turning out quick cheap direct-to-video buck-makers, and this is treated no differently.

That said, the basement and the tunnels beneath it are revoltingly squalid and intimidating, and the creature is good quality and looks disgusting (although my other half felt the goo dripping off it was excessive - as if being used to hid bad special effects).

You get to see a decent amount of the monster, and the final portion of the film is an extended hunt and escape scenario with a decent amount of tension. Some of the effects are clearly matte-paintings etc, but that was common for the era and they're pretty impressive in their own right.

In conclusion, if you're a Stephen King completist, this is a must-view. It's flawed but entertaining, and well worth your time.

This is what happens when you try to make a low-budget Die-Hard in a mountain resort with a lack of ideas, a lack of budget, and a direct-to-video action hero.

You get Christopher Plummer doing a bad imitation of a German bad guy. Why? Because Hans Gruber was German and European baddies were in style at the time. You get an entire resort being held hostage when the bad guys could have achieved their target when it was on its way or leaving the hotel instead.

You get bad guys deciding not to shoot the hero because they want to beat him up some more, and then - surprise - dying because of their stupidity. You also get some laughably bizarre decisions: Griffith's 'Jack' is such an antisocial idiot that it's amazing anyone talks to him at all. It's one thing to write a character as being moody and in emotional pain - it's another to make them a total jackass who's rude to absolutely everybody. We also get a female criminal henchman who speaks with a distractingly deep voice, and cheap-looking action that largely ignores the mountain setting and could have been filmed in a hotel in Baltimore (the image on the cover never happens). Oh, and awesomely rubbish dialogue: "They've taken the hotel, and everyone in it, hostage!!!" You can take people hostage. You can't take a hotel hostage. It's a building...

The action is low budget, the ideas are low-creativity, and the director is clearly a low-achiever. A pile of junk trying to cash in on the 'Die Hard in a-' craze.

Rising star Ryan Reynolds gets vey little to do in this movie - it's largely Douglas and Brooks' show - and it's just fine for it. Douglas and Brooks create the odd-couple chemistry on which the comedy works. Douglas is a secret agent in the middle of a case, who never seems to have time to be a father to his son (Reynolds) despite the latter's upcoming nuptials. Brooks is a fussy, uptight podiatrist who likes everything to be done the right way, and finds Douglas' seemingly shoddy parenting offensive even before he gets accidentally dragged into a spy operation to stop a terrorist deal.

By and large the comedy lands well - Douglas has easy charisma and is well supported by a witty script that isn't afraid to feed Brooks a few key scenes that affect the action. We get chases, infiltration scenes, FBI harassment, wedding mis-haps and fish-out-of-water comedy as Brooks has to go undercover.

The film makes a few mis-steps; - David Suchet's volatile arms dealer is funny, but the film stretches an ongoing joke about his sexuality so far that it starts to become homophobic, and both bride and groom get very little to do besides look befuddled and gawp.

Luckily those mis-steps are few and forgivable - the rest of the film is a fun, silly experience that would happily enliven an evening.