One of countless Stephen King adaptations, this take on one is set in a Maine textile mill whose overbearing manager (Stephen Macht) finds himself in a tight spot when county inspectors crack down on his less-than-safe operation after a fatal accident involving a picking machine. He rounds up a few financially-desperate locals — including drifter David Anderson, the film's nominal hero — into a rag-tag crew to clean up the nightmarish, rat-infested lower levels of the decrepit building. Working their way through the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the mill, the crew encounters a rat's nest far beyond what their foreman had imagined, with a gigantic, man-eating monster rodent nesting at its center.

For those looking for perhaps the worst adaptation of Stephen King's writing, your search is over. Graveyard Shift is a 50-cent production that spends almost its entire 87 minutes underground; this locale, however, is the only thing in the movie that gets below the surface. A handful of anonymous characters go poking around in a rat's nest, which is not the smartest place to be when the rats are bigger than they are. Laughable effects and deplorable acting leave Graveyard Shift only moderately creepy even in its best moments, which are hardly worthy of that description. Brad Dourif's gleefully eccentric exterminator is mildly diverting; he's also the only character worth rooting for. The compulsion to option every piece of writing in King's arsenal, from his best-sellers right down to his grocery list, is the only possible excuse for this piece of wretchedness. A curious side note: In what may be a first, or at least a case of familiarity breeding comfort, evil factory boss Stephen Macht appeared in an unrelated vampire movie, also called Graveyard Shift, in 1987.