He is, as you’ve probably guessed, an exterminator. Brad Dourif plays a character called The Exterminator.

A beacon of bugnuts crazy in a boiler suit. This is probably because when the giant bat does show up, it looks a bit like a vertical hammock and is somewhat underwhelming. There is one shining light in the darkness though. The film also hides its monster, a giant bat, for the most part, utilising close ups to shock and cutting away to the devastation it leaves. Whether it’s the blood soaking into the wool in the machinery or someone getting their arm torn off by something in the walls, there’s a gleefully liberal use of red spatters. Stephen Macht gets a good, near-Dickensian bad guy to play with and chews through scenery with a suitable amount of enthusiasm, but that’s about all there is to War-Wick. As with most of the lesser King adaptations seen in this series, the commitment to gore is nevertheless strong. The characters are barely given more development than their allotted archetype allows, which means there’s no real emotional hook for the audience to hang on when the scares arrive. David Andrews is saddled with what amounts to a blank slate in drifter John Hall and he does little to give the character any charisma or sympathy beyond us finding out he’s a widower. Unfortunately, it’s mostly downhill from here. We don’t see much, just the wool turning scarlet red with blood and a mangled limb on the floor. The guy messes with them by throwing a rat into the machinery, only for something monstrous to show up and do the same thing to him.

It’s a sweaty summer night in Maine and the graveyard shift guy is doing his job, surrounding by the rats that call the mill their home. Singleton are trying to go with it, but as has often been the case in these adaptations, it’s not that successful. The film starts well, beginning with the kind of cold open that shows like Supernatural would go on to perfect. It’s a valiant effort and it’s easy to see where Esposito and director Ralph S. John Esposito is on screenplay duties here, taking a claustrophobic story about mutant rats and crafting a movie about a tale of old horrors, blue collar strife, and small town politics. Graveyard Shift is adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, which appeared in his Night Shift collection. Newcomer and seemingly professional drifter John (David Andrews) is part of the group that discovers rats may not be the only thing infesting the tunnels beneath the mill. Tempting a group with double pay, foreman Warwick (Stephen Macht), pronounced ‘War-Wick’ by everyone in the film, gets them to start cleaning out the basement. The film: An abandoned textile mill has been re-opened, but is infested with rats and has a basement full of junk that needs clearing out.

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