Movie: Graveyard Shift (1990)

While there are many interesting stories in Night Shift, "Graveyard Shift" wasn't really one of them. It was one of Stephen King's first stories to appear in a professional magazine. Though Cavalier wasn't exact renowned for its stories, you go where the work is, I suppose.

Translated verbatim, "Graveyard Shift" would make an (even more) terrible movie, so substantial changes needed to be made to create a convincing 90-minute movie. First off, the mill staff is entirely male, which could never work in a feature film that isn't about war, so female characters are inserted, and one of the existing characters, Wisconsky, is now female. Warwick, who wasn't exactly in the running for "world's best boss" in the story, is twisted up into a real monster with no regard for his employees (or OSHA for that matter), verbally and physically abusing them constantly through the movie. Hall is cast as an exceptionally good character, who in short order hooks up with Wisconsky. And there you have it: the hero, the villain, and the damsel in distress roles are all filled. Oh, and there is also an actual graveyard awkwardly stuffed into the narrative.

I will give very feeble credit to this movie on two counts: (1) it is one of the few to actually be filmed in the state of Maine, and (2) the sets were actually pretty well done. If their intention is to depict a cleanup operation of a hopelessly decrepit facility, they succeed admirably. However, if your factory is so far gone that you need to put a fire hose to the rodent problem, destroying your (probably worthless) assets in the process, you may want to consider fire instead and take the insurance money!

Much to my surprise (and horror), the movie actually made money. Somehow they managed to recoup the millions it cost to make the movie, and then some, opening the door to further cruddy adaptations of marginal Stephen King works. The director, Ralph Singleton, however, never directed another film after this, his directorial debut. Davd Andrews (Hall) has enjoyed a fairly robust career in television since this movie. Stephen Macht (Warwick), who has the most garbled Maine accent I've ever heard in my life, is also mostly in television (soaps and basic cable stuff), as well as some truly regrettable movies. Supposedly he was supposed to be Capt. Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which obviously didn't happen.

On a side note, I ended up watching an edited version of this movie, complete with awkward commercial interruptions, on the Sundance channel. You may think that because the channel say "Sundance" it shows award-winning cutting-edge stuff without editing for time, content, or to fit your screen, but you'd be wrong. Apparently that all went away in 2007 and it is now on par with sister channels AMC and IFC, meaning the original series stuff is probably decent, but the movies they show are just a bunch of garbage filler. Lessons learned. I probably didn't miss a whole bunch here.

Movie: Children of the Corn (2009)

Let us take a moment to sort out the vast Corn franchise. The original short story appeared in Penthouse in 1977, to the delight of those select few who were reading for the stories. A year later it was anthologized into Night Shift. Seven years later it broke out on to the big screen, the first of many movies from Night Shift to receive the movie treatment. In the 1990's no less than five sequels were cranked out, all straight to video except for 1992's Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, which proved yet again a proud tradition of horror franchises that using the word "final" did not mean anything of the kind. Even bringing back Isaac (played by then 40-year-old John Franklin) couldn't reverse the sagging fortunes of the franchise and it seemed that 2001's Children of the Corn: Revelation (the seventh time around) marked the end of the road.

Enter SyFy, the network that proudly serves up big heaps of Sharknado movies every weekend, to bring Children of the Corn back to life in 2009 with a complete reboot. I'm not sure if this was the reboot America was crying out for, but it happened and I watched it.

The 2009 version is part of a larger trend in Stephen King movies to be more faithful to the source material. Especially in the case of short stories, where the sin of padding instead of cutting occurs, this would seem like a welcome development. Unfortunately, the result is a much more boring movie. If you loved the original short story, watching this will make you think you've already read the shooting script, as, for the most part, they play things very close to it. Vicky and Burt bicker, they get killed by the children, and the fateful decision to lower the death-ceremony age to 18 is played out.

On one hand this version is surprising in that it keeps the action in the mid-1970's, meaning the production team decided to keep everything relatively period-specific in terms of fashions and cars and so forth. They could have copped out and just made it present day. On the other hand, they are so obsessed at driving that point home that they added a bunch of padding about Burt struggling with his tour of duty in Vietnam that gradually overwhelms the entire narrative. They also make an executive decision to make Vicky African-American, casting Kandyse McClure in the role. Faithful readers of this blog may remember her as black Sue Snell in the 2002 Carrie, while everyone else knows her as Dee from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. She never really bothered me in those shows, but here she is generally obnoxious, more so than Vicky was in the story, plus throughout she is wearing a yellow dress the size of a large cocktail napkin. Not exactly the gear you want to sport to battle the Old Testament kids.

A big change in this version is that the kids are much younger. While the 1984 movie, for example, cast a 25 year old man as 13 year old Isaac, this one goes the other direction, casting a nine year old that bore a strange resemblance to Joe, the little kid from Modern Family. Even if  you can get around the fact they probably cast him too young, it gets pretty clear the actor was being forced to utter a bunch of Old Testament prophecy that made no sense to him.

Finally the producers decided it was necessary to show how the children of the corn made...uh...more children of the corn. I guess I could have filled in those blanks on my own, but apparently the creepy death ritual performed on the 19 year olds doesn't shock (or titillate?) modern audiences. I guess the 1980's were a more innocent time after all.