The Shark Film Office: Marina Monster (2008)

Marina Monster (2008)
Dir.: Christine Whitlock
Cinema 4 Rating: 1/9

If I ever get the chance to make my own monster, shark, OR monstrous shark movie, I hope it's half as stupid as Marina Monster.

Farting and burping sounds when some characters appear in view of the camera. Clown horns punctuating "jokes" so that we are certain to understand they were meant that way. A foghorn-and-cowbell combination (or sometimes a couple of bass notes) that sounds when certain female breasts arrive onscreen (always covered discreetly). Cliched, noirish saxophone bursts when one character is seduced by another or when one particularly muscled character lifts his shirt. Cash register noises when another character makes drug deals over and over again. A rumbling sound (accompanied by a shaky camera) that occurs every time (and there are many of these moments) that a dock in the harbor is hit by the titular monster. Marina Monster is a cornucopia of ridiculous sound effects that are draped over a film where every other element can be charitably called "amateurish" but more often lends itself to a constant sad shaking of one's head while wondering if carrying on through the remainder of the film is a worthwhile option.

The character names are meant to be silly and parodic, so certainly this film is never meant to be taken seriously for even a second. How could you with names such as Earl Molar, Oceanna Anchor, Commodore Drip Molar, Commodore Skip Anchor, Zena Waters, Skipper Surf Toe, Rusty Winch, Aqua Foam, and Bibby Rigger? It was one of the rare aspects of this film that I found quite pleasant, wondering just how far the filmmaker, Christine Whitlock, would take the gag. Well, it would seem nearly into porn territory with other names like Stiff Mast (the muscle guy) and Limp Eel, but Marina Monster is far too chaste (except for some weird stepmother incest gags) and almost naive to go too far. I somewhat imagine Whitlock as being a cousin to the director of the film being made in 1976's The First Nudie Musical, who is called upon to helm a porn musical (titled Come, Come Again), but keeps giggling and hiding his eyes during the sex scenes.

But that feeling of a porn-level parody is certainly apt here when one considers that most of the cast seems to be filled with anyone who happened to cross Whitlock's path on the day the scenes were filmed. I might actually be more impressed with the outcome were this the case (and it is an interesting concept for an experiment), but it is also clear that there are many people in the cast -- the larger, speaking roles -- who at least have some theatrical experience. I'm not sure this extends to the actor playing the film's narrator, who introduces himself as Professor Squid -- that's right -- from a room with a white curtained backdrop, a whiteboard (and water bottle) on an easel, various shark drawings, and a table with a map of the bay, on which are placed toy boats and a toy shark. Professor Squid opens Marina Monster's story with this anti-shark rant:

"Today, we're here to talk about sharks, evil eating machines that live in the ocean... but not always! They're now in fresh water, eating people wherever they go. Hungry, evil sharks! In the bay, fisherman are noticing less fish. Bull sharks have been seen in the Mississippi River going as far north as Illinois, eating as they go in fresh water."

The location then switches to a harbor that I would guess is in Hamilton, Ontario, where director Whitlock lives and films her micro-budget movies. On a small dock, we are given the basic template for nearly every attack that occurs throughout the picture. An unidentified man sits on the end of the dock, swishing the water with a small net attached to a long pole. A second man in a stupid straw hat and floral print shirt is standing on the dock a few feet away. A girl in a bikini walks down the length of the dock and comes up to the first man and crouches down to ask him how the fishing is going. The girl says that she will see him in Jamaica (totally unexplained) and walks away. The second man, utterly without provocation, strides up to the first man and shoves him hard into the waters of the bay (mind you, the dock is about two feet above the water).

Suddenly, there is a shark seen on the surface of the water. The girl runs back to pull her friend out, but suddenly there is that low rumble and a shaking of the camera. The girl is thrown off balance into the water. The first man is then pulled underneath the water to never be seen again. The second man, still on the dock, is shaken into the drink by another rumble of the dock. Both he and the girl are then pulled under to the depths of the bay. We return to Professor Squid, who quips with a shit-eating grin: "Hungry little thing, isn't it?" The shark, clearly phony, is shown "swimming" on the surface as the film cuts to the interminable opening credits, nearly three minutes of mind-numbing regatta footage set to an exceedingly generic rock beat.

This opening attack sequence, where three or more people fall into the water in succession and get eaten by a largely unseen predator is repeated time and again throughout the film, though always with small variances in the number of people. I'm not quite sure why everyone is fishing with what amounts to a pool skimmer, but they are, and perhaps the various "no fishing" signs we are shown throughout the film might attest to the limits taken during filming. This also points to me that these dock scenes may have been shot on the sly and without permission of the harbor where they occur. Since there are no shots of the shark next to the docks or any gore effects at all, and people just jump or fall in and splash around before going under, I'd say it is likely this was the case. Also, the bumping of the dock by the shark is used pretty inconsistently, and so you get several scenes of people just simply falling or really jumping into the water without real purpose behind it. And most of these scenes are started with people getting into a small squabble over some imagined gripe or grudge, and then someone gets pushed in, leading to a chain reaction of falls and deaths.

In some ways, the repetition of these scenes is quite hypnotic, and instead of needing the story's plot to escape from the poorly filmed attack scenes, these attack scenes actually serve as a refuge from the terrible dramatics and dialogue of the rest of the film. That you will only go about three to four minutes before more people get eaten becomes a blessing. This film has a tremendously high body count for a shark film that isn't Sharknado. There are forty people listed as "victims" in the closing credits, and sure enough, when one counts up all thirteen attacks in the film, the final death toll is a solid forty. And yet, there is nothing in the plot about anyone actually trying to figure why people are disappearing, even after a couple of main characters see five people lose their lives.

• By the 15-minute mark of Marina Monster, ten people have already been eaten, in between brief moments with the film's actual speaking characters setting up the plot of the film.
• By the 30-minute mark, one would think there would be some investigation as to why 23 people have disappeared around the harbor area in a rather short amount of story time. 
• It is 33 minutes into the film when the two lead characters, Earl Molar and his lady love Oceanna Anchor, realize that something horrid is going in the water. But still nothing gets done.
• At the 40-minute mark, the body count is 35, and the film's reporter character, Lola Dent, who is investigating the embezzlement scandal at the core of the plot, finally mentions the "people missing from the piers and marinas in the bay."
• 52 minutes in, we have the full 40 victims.

After most of the attacks, Professor Squid will chime in for a few seconds with a statement, often unrelated to what has just occurred, except that there happens to be a shark and he has eaten a few more people. Sometimes he is holding a toy shark or even a shark pool toy. Amongst Prof. Squid's -- ahem -- witticisms:

• "Bull sharks are eating machines, hungry creatures that love to eat, and eat, and eat."
• "Bull sharks in marinas find things to eat."
• "Oh, my word! That teenage shark has an appetite, doesn't it?"
• "My, what big teeth he has!"
• "He just doesn't get enough to eat, does he?"
• "Male bull sharks eat alone." (This one is odd because it is attached to only scene where the shark devours a single male victim.)
• "Vhat, a little kosher meal?" (Interesting in that none of the victims in this scene seem to be obviously Jewish in any way whatsoever, not that they couldn't possibly have been. And if there were, how offensive would this be?)
• "A bull shark is your worst nightmare."

But enough of the oddly inserted Professor Squid moments. Surprisingly, there is a ridiculously convoluted plot in Marina Monster built around an annual regatta event called the "Around the Bay" race. It's really not worth following through even the first scene, but the director's website insists it is based on Romeo and Juliet. (But sadly, no suicide parts.) Yes, there are a lead couple in the film that are secretly in love at the start of the film, and their respective fathers are each from a different rival yacht club. But for most of Marina Monster, we get no recognizable romantic feeling from these characters until very deep into the story, and really only after the shark is dispatched four/fifths of the way through the running time.

The real plot of the film involves Commodore Drip Molar, head of the regatta committee, who has squandered the yacht club's funds and needs to win the big race to save his ass. His current wife (his third) is fooling around with anybody she can get her hands on, including his son Earl, quite against Earl's wishes. (Her big come-on line is "My name is San-dee, but I'm smooth." It is one of many failed double entendres buried in this movie.)  Also, one of the Commodore's exes wants him back and is willing to blackmail him to get her wish. The Commodore is also deeply involved financially with a drug dealer (who looks like he stepped right out of Miami Vice) named Surf Toe. Part of the reason for the plot getting so confused is that new characters -- not counting the dock victims -- are still being introduced past the halfway point.

Every character seems to either have slept with the other characters, or wants to sleep with the other characters. Everyone flirts endlessly, saying odd pickup lines quite out of sync with the rest of the action going on around them. Most of the characters also think nothing of trying to seduce other characters directly in front of girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, and husbands. The camera, too, gets into the horny act. While women are certainly capable of creating exploitation films of both the softcore and hardcore varieties, it is still rather odd that the camera will almost unconsciously drift down to ogle the bosoms of various women -- whether said bosoms are worthy of ogling or not -- and will do so often when fading out of a scene. Since the film is not sold as a softcore product at all and actually has zero nudity in it, there is a great reliance on breast shots and the aforementioned comic sound effects that go with those shots. 

In one scene featuring otherwise unnamed and heretofore unknown victims, one young woman (definitely one of the fairer ones in the film) is never really given a closeup so that we really know what she looks like. But her breasts sure get a closeup. After her would-be boyfriend falls into the water, she runs along the dock and the camera stays tight on her chest and stomach for the entire run, until she too falls in to be eaten by the shark. It is scenes like this that really make me wonder what the aims of the filmmaker were in creating this film. As I mentioned, through her dialogue and scenario, she seems remarkably naive about sexual affairs. It is entirely possible that her goals were merely a personal "whim" (i.e., Whitlock loves titties), and were that to be revealed to me, I would be just dandy with it. Until then, the true meaning remains a mystery.

Also, my guess about the actors being friends of the director stems mainly from the fact that there seems to have been little thought given to just who should play what role, like she just said, "Hey, do you want a part in my film?" and then choosing a random name in the screenplay and saying, "Here... play this character." Couples seem truly mismatched, most of the cast is physically what many would term "sloppy" (there are four or five traditionally attractive females -- all playing shark victims -- in the usual cinematic sense), and even the lead parts seem to have been given to their actors "just because". That said, I guess that I do have to applaud Whitlock for putting just anybody in this film no matter what body type they possess, and in bikinis no less... and then pushing them off a dock to get eaten by a shark. It's like she is taking a stand against body-shaming, and then suddenly having a change of heart partway through that stand.

With around sixteen minutes to go in this seventy-minute film, we finally get the big "Around the Bay" race. This apparently consists of generic, absolutely non-thrilling sailing footage posing as a regatta race around the bay, all shot from far away from the boats. In fact, except for the bit that I am about mention in a few seconds, there is no attempt at all at showing an actual boat with one of the characters from the film manning it as they sail about on the waters of the bay. The closest we get is a shot of two boats in the distance, with subtitles underneath each boat telling us which one is Skip and which one is Drip.

There is, however, around the fifty-six minute mark of Marina Monster, a five-minute segment of the film where its visual style is completely at odds with the rambling, unintentionally hilarious stillness that precedes it. We get a real, close-up glimpse of the monster shark, a seemingly papier-mâché creation that, quite surprising, not only talks but sings, "Give me yum yums!" in a style that must have been inspired by Little Shop of Horrors. He only sings that line a couple of times before the hero arrives to dispatch him, but the appearance of the shark, as no-frills and handmade as he obviously is, came as a welcome relief to this viewer. So, too, did the use of green screen to film the scene of the hero and heroine both being menaced by and killing the monster shark. It looks amateurish and silly, but when matched against everything else in the film, it looks brilliant. It made me wish more of the film had been done in this quite obviously hammy and self-aware style. Naturally, the film doesn't want to be taken seriously at any point, but I would have ironically taken this film more seriously if they had gone out of their way to be a little more craftsmanlike in their silliness.

After forty murders and the revelation of a singing sea-beast, the shark action ends with over thirteen minutes left in the film. In the last decently filmed shot in the film, the Romeo and Juliet couple finally get their smooch on, in another green-screen shot with a pink background and scores of red heart-shaped balloons falling down all around them. It should be noted that Oceanna takes the initiative and dips Earl, planting the massive kiss on him. But after that, what else could they have to do for thirteen minutes? The film snaps out of its brief green-screen reverie and switches back to its previous dull business.

And this is where I tell you that this film is a sequel to another Christine Whitlock-helmed monster fish movie called Sharp Teeth, filmed in 2006. Some of the characters/actors in this film starred in Sharp Teeth as well, including the lead character, Earl Molar. That film was about a normal carp that was mutated into a monstrous killer by a bag of "Experimental Super Grow Fish Food". How do I know this without having seen Sharp Teeth except for a trailer? Well, in those final thirteen minutes, Marina Monster seems to decide to connect the dots with its predecessor and have a couple of characters from the first film show up at the end. Why? Really not sure at all. We get a couple of flashback scenes involving Earl Molar's buddy who is now a cop, and then another where we see a character who is now in a wheelchair due to what happened with the monster carp from Sharp Teeth. After this, the film switches back to Professor Squid again, who says "There are other terrors lurking in the bay!" with a strange intonation. Again, why? And once more, I am not sure. Was there supposed to be a third film to complete this trilogy of harbor-based marine terror?

Whitlock has only produced one other film since then, a Caribbean set "psychological horror" film released in 2013 called Days of the Iguanas. The movie doesn't even appear on IMDb in her filmography, but it is available on Amazon on DVD. I don't know if it has any connection at all with the first two films, but the line early on when the second shark victim tells the first that she will see him in Jamaica has me wondering.

I mentioned in the first line of this piece that if I made a shark movie of the low-budget and low-aiming style of Marina Monster, that I would be happy indeed if my film came out half as stupid as this one does. To be sure, I am envious of filmmakers like Whitlock and her ilk, who do what they have to do to get their goofy projects made, no matter the outcome. Back in Alaska, I had some friends recently take part in a horror spoof called Moose: The Movie, written and directed by other acquaintances. Against all odds, it not only managed to get a fair amount of press during its making and after it was released, but even garnered a couple of decent reviews. This is not par for the course for such projects, of course, and most low-budget, non-Hollywood-based directors have to settle for putting out a movie where everyone involved will basically just have to be excited that it ever got completed. There will be little in the way of tangible success, if any, and they are bound to take a severe critical ravaging from all sides, including dopey websites like mine.

Yes, Marina Monster is insipid and truly bottom of the barrel in every element of its creation. And even though it gets my lowest rating that I can possibly give such a film, that does not mean that I don't admire it in a small, strange way. That is, I wish that I had gotten the chance to make such a film, and to be laughed at roundly for doing so. It wouldn't matter, because I would have made a silly monster shark movie. There is a pride in just doing such a thing. But for now, I guess that I will just be happy that I survived two viewings -- yes, two -- of Marina Monster and feel none the worse for it.

Except for my eyes, which now just want to casually rest upon whichever poorly cast, sloppy bosoms happen to cross my path... DAMN YOU, CHRISTINE WHITLOCK!!! I've been cursed!

RTJ

A Plague of Killer Frogs, One Ribbit at a Time...

Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake [aka Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell] (1982)
Dir.: Bill Rebane
Cinema 4 Rating: 3/9

Mostly because of Kermit's influence and guilty feelings left over from high school, I've always been pretty partial to frogs. I have met and even held a few frogs and toads in the time since, and I generally think they are a pretty cute and personable lot. But I must admit that they can be a bit creepy when put on film in the wrong circumstances. Frogs and toads are predatory creatures after all, and they can be quite ravenous, even resorting to cannibalism in some species. But I suppose even the world's most kindly creature, such as a baby lamb, can seem pretty creepy if you angle the camera just right, adjust the lights to a mood appropriate for menace, and add a hauntingly plinking piano chord at just the right moment.

In Bill Rebane's Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake, we are shown several brief shots of frogs early on in the film in the first couple of attack scenes, but since there is a horrible monster right on the poster of the movie, you know they are just there to throw you off the trail a bit. Sure enough, Rebane, the notoriously schlocky independent filmmaker (The Giant Spider Invasion, Monster-a-Go Go, The Capture of Bigfoot), is intent on going far beyond mere killer frogs with this effort. He gives us a monster frogman instead, as in a man-sized frog that kills people, not a murderous diver. And the way this creature kills is pretty unique to something that is half man, half frog; he prefers to chuck a spear through the victim's chest or thorax to pull his prey underwater to devour them.

The attack scenes in Rana are usually preceded by a few large bubble bursts on the surface of the water. I couldn't help but think of George Carlin's bit about the Fump, the mythic man who makes the bubbles in the bathtub when one farts in the water. But I also thought of Lawrence Welk's bubble machine the more the film went along, which also led my mind to the cult classic Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind where the bubbles start flying through the air as the short's spoof of the Close Encounters music starts to play. I also hummed the Mr. Bubble theme song too, so that might give some indicator of just how slow Rana was in the early going.

The first attack scene is pretty gruesome, and accidentally enhanced by the graininess of the print that is available on the streaming services (such as Amazon VOD and Troma's official YouTube channel). From there the film is rather slow-going as we meet character after character investigating this and that about the creature. We also meet Charlie, a wizened townie of partial native heritage and questionable intellect who claims that he knows everything that is going on with the mysterious disappearances in the town; mainly, that a race of ancient frog people haunt the area. In a truly committed performance, Charlie (played by some old dude) tells us all we need to know in several moments, but most dramatically in this brilliant bit of dialogue: "I been down to the lake. Been watchin' them frogs. They actin' very peculiar... very peculiar. They know, they know, they know, they know, they know..."

Charlie is not played by the worst actor in the film by half. One actress seems to have a particularly hard time getting through her dialogue, at one point panting out, "I'm... anxious... to see.. the site... where it... was found." She's riding on horseback, so she can't possibly be reading off of something (unless her dialogue is braided into the horse's mane), so maybe she can only repeat two syllables at a time, tops. The acting in the rest of the film is passable though, as long as you don't dwell upon it too long.

The film also goes for a little of that patented '70s-style rapiness (my term), where there always has to be at least one character, if not more, that gets a little too grabby with the lady-folk, especially when said females have passed out from being frightened. This definitely adds a bit more to the creep factor, and also makes it more pleasing later on in the film when this character meets his inevitable end at the hands of the creature. And speaking of inevitable ends, the violent fate of another noxious character, a trigger-happy local logger, gives his actor the chance to react ultra-dramatically in one of the most egregious examples of a slow-motion death scene that I have seen.

I may have rated this film pretty low, but that is not to say that I don't admire Rebane's resolve in getting his little Wisconsin-crafted films completed over the years. He has gotten a lot of knocks in cult film and genre review books over the years, but I think Rana has some scenes that work pretty well for what it is. I also know, watching this film for the first time as a man past fifty, that if I had seen Rana when I was a kid or a tween, that its atmosphere and a few of its darker scenes (such as the amphibian arm crashing through the window; always on my short list of genuine terrors) would have had me pooping my drawers, at least figuratively, if not literally. (We lived in the woods with a lot of uncovered windows in the house; the dark of winter was hell for me because of my lifelong tendency to be influenced by films like this.) There is a cool scene where the frog creature gets some of his fingers chopped off, and they continue to pulse and claw at the tabletop. Plus, Rebane's creature costume reminds me of a even poorer version of a Sleestak costume (a childhood obsession), and that is terror enough for me right there.

Troma Films, which now distributes the film, couldn't bear to go with the original Rana title and decided to gimmick it up even more by renaming it -- in Troma's usual subtle way -- Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell. In some ways, I guess this could be considered an upgrade, but the title and poster artwork for the original film were already pretty decent (as these things go). Certainly the artwork for the Troma version is far worse [see image to the right].

Rebane's films are always hard to watch on a technical level just because they seem to be shot in a fog and have terrible sound mixes. But I have always found them rather earnest in an Ed Wood-like way, and they are never tongue-in-cheek or played for straight laughs. His films are also usually shot in Wisconsin, which is always a nice thing to see for this descendant of cheeseheads.

What I said before about Rebane's efforts being accidentally enhanced by the low standards of his filming is true, at least for me. But on the Wikipedia page for this film, there is an non-cited reference to Lloyd Kaufman's autobiography where it says he included Rana [nee Croaked] as one of the five worst films Troma has released. I am going to say that if Troma had produced this film (since they actually didn't), it would have actually come out far worse than it already is. It would probably have been cheesier and laden with horrid, sexist jokes, probably the cinematic equivalent of the latter day poster they contrived for it. While there are several films of Troma's for which I have a genuine regard and even like very much, the bulk of their output is far, far below what is on display in Rana. Honestly, my heart kind of goes out to Rebane and his silly but earnest frogman film. It's really bad, but its the sort of badness I would have cherished as a kid, and the type for which I can still summon up some love today.


Frog-g-g! [aka Frogman] (2004)
Dir.: Cody Jarrett
Cinema 4 Rating: 3/9

Any fan of Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) -- or even Vernon Zimmerman's Fade to Black (1982) which makes knowledge of White Heat a plot point -- knows that the character James Cagney played in that film was named Arthur "Cody" Jarrett. So, when I am confronted with a director named Cody Jarrett, I am apt to take a cynical eye towards the veracity of the director's name. Is is a pseudonym? Is it a joke? Tribute? Hard to say, since his bio on IMDb says nothing about his name and I have found nothing elsewhere on the web regarding whether it is a stylistic hipster thing or if he is just named Cody Jarrett, apart from a tidbit about him playing in several bands in L.A. Still, I did have a hard time getting past dwelling on whether his name really was Cody Jarrett as I went into watching Frog-g-g! for the first time.

We are shown an opening scene where a mother and her young son are picnicking by a lake. The kid runs off -- his mother told him not to run! -- to "fish" with a string tied to a stick, but instead pokes the stick at a small blob-ish object in the water. The blob, presumably a giant tadpole, snaps at the pole and the kid screams. His mother tells him that he is going to grow up to be a big frog and the kid replies, as precociously as possible, "I'm not a frog! I'm an astronaut!" The credits start, and we are subjected to a slow-motion lesbian tonguing fest in all the places a lesbian can tongue another lesbian except where we would really like to see her get tongued, in order to not get an X rating. (C'mon, you know I am talking about the elbow, the greatest but least known erogenous zone there is... you sickos.)

One half of the loving duo is Dr. Barbara Michaels (Kristi Russell) and she will spend the bulk of the film, as a scientist and inspector for the Environmental Protection Agency, battling with a local chemical company over exactly what is going on with the contaminated water in the town. If this sounds remarkably in line with a certain problem going on in Flint, Michigan in the real world, be thankful (or saddened, in my case) that we haven't heard anything in the news about any violent attacks and disappearances due to mysterious frogmen in the Michigan area. In the small town in Frog-g-g!, we will deal with a strange creature that has not just been terrorizing the locals, but has also been trying to have his way with the ladies in the town.

But before we get to that, Dr. Michaels gathers the mounting evidence that, in Prince's words, there "must be something in the water they drink". She sees a fish that has several pairs of googly eyes attached to it, is told of a tadpole "the size of a Frisbee" (probably the one the precocious kid met in the opening scene) and finds that there are acid levels 50 times the norm in some samples she has taken. She does some basic science experiments you can find in any high school science class (we even see a dissected frog), and she also experiments with her girlfriend in some more slow-motion, gratuitous lovemaking. A low speed, relatively brief film, Frog-g-g! gets nearly to the halfway point without having anything in the way of rapist frog action at all.

The contaminated water starts to affect certain members of the town adversely (as contaminated water tends to do). On the way home from the bar, Dr. Michaels and Trixie end up in a car crash when a green, sprinting figure darts in front of their vehicle in the darkness. In the hospital, none of the authorities - including the obstinate but dedicated sheriff -- believe Dr. Michaels when she tells them what caused the accident.

And then the rapes start happening. A young couple are having sex when we get to see the frogman in full view for the first time. Up until this point, the film has pretty much played everything straight, without any real jokes outside of some small character stuff. But then the frog-suit is seen for what it is, and it becomes really hard to get past the original straight, serious tone with something so ridiculous and bug-eyed making jazz hands. The frogman kills the boyfriend with a slash of his arm, and then hops onto the girl and takes over the humping. It is at this point that we realize that maybe this film is more than just a tad rapey. While the girl, her eyes closed, suddenly realizes that the sex has gotten better, she then sees her boyfriend dead on the floor and then screams when she sees what is actually hopping up and down on top of her -- yes, with all four limbs spread-eagled, the frogman leaps up and down while commencing his "love" act.

If you are thinking that all of this buildup is just so the filmmakers can use the term "horny toad" at some point, you win a cigar, boy! "You're in no shape to go toe to toe with some giant horny toad!" is indeed shouted by the sheriff at one crucial juncture. If you are also thinking that "Hey... corrupt local company experimenting with toxins... amphibious rapist creatures in a small town... rampant nudity... isn't this Humanoids from the Deep?" then you win another prize.

The filmmakers are aware that the suit is ridiculous, however; they embrace this silliness pretty well when the frogman takes over a local high school football game, and there is a goofy frogman dance over the closing credits. They also have a couple of blink-and-you-will-miss them cameo roles for cult fave Mary Woronov and Gregg Araki regular James Duval, appropriate to this sort of schlock. Some of the smaller roles in the film are acted pretty stiffly, but the leads (Dr. Michaels and the sheriff) aren't too shabby for this level of film, and those actors at least commit themselves to their material. There is also a closing scene -- silly, but completely expected -- that was reminiscent of other more memorably fun horror films, such as Larry Cohen's It's Alive. 

The tone of the film shifts from serious to downright silly when the frogman suit is seen, but it is hard to laugh when the joke is that women are getting raped. Even when the rapist is a six-foot-tall, green frogman-creature with goggles for eyes.

We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Graveyard Shift, Pt. 2

[This is Part 2 of our discussion of Stephen King's short story, Graveyard Shift, and its 1990 film adaptation. To read the first part of this discussion, in which my partner Aaron Lowe and I dive deeply into the short story, visit Aaron's website, Working Dead Productions, here.]

*****

The Film: Graveyard Shift 
[1990, Paramount Pictures; directed by Ralph Singleton; screenplay by John Esposito]

Rik: I saw the film version of Graveyard Shift in a movie theatre in Anchorage, Alaska in 1990. I was fully excited to watch the film, as I was then still quite hopeful that cool flicks could be built out of King’s stories. At that point in time, the hit-or-miss ratio for King films was still decidedly (at least in my opinion) on the hit side, thanks in part to filmmakers such as De Palma, Kubrick, Hooper, Cronenberg, Carpenter, and Reiner each delivering big on the entertainment front early on in the sub-genre. And yet, the overall quality had started to slip for me, with duds like Firestarter, Creepshow 2, and the King-directed Maximum Overdrive, so the ratio was bound to even out eventually.

And to say that we, as a group, walked out of the theatre entertained by Graveyard Shift would be an outright lie. It was a solid disappointment at the time, especially since we had fairly recently been thrilled pretty well by Pet Sematary, though the Tales from the Darkside film that came in-between was somewhat of a letdown. Graveyard Shift was more than a letdown for me; I hated it. Perhaps ignoring the fact that a film filled with rats and bats and mutant varieties thereof should make me feel like this, the film physically repulsed me. By the setting, by the acting, by the general sliminess of the thing… I was repulsed. I never recorded it off of cable as I did other King adaptations over the years, and I never watched it again until I just did for this conversation.

Aaron, what was your first experience with the film version of Graveyard Shift like? Do you remember how it affected you?

Aaron: As with the short story, I can’t tell you exactly when I saw it, but I can pinpoint where I was first introduced to the film: Video City on Jewel Lake Boulevard in Anchorage, Alaska. My family had a pretty regular routine at this time; every Friday my mom and siblings would drive over to either Blockbuster or Video City (Video City was closer, but Blockbuster often had a larger selection of the new releases) and rent one film each. Of course, the goal was to find something that everyone would be interested in, so no one had to suffer in boredom for their turn with the VCR, but I was the oldest and so I knew I had the luxury of staying up later than anyone else and having the TV to myself as long as I could keep my eyes open. As my love of film bloomed, I would often make solo journeys to Video City on my bicycle and peruse the selection for the umpteenth time, even if I wasn’t able to rent at the time. The one section I kept going back to was, of course, the horror section.

At the time, the horror section was its own tiny room with a saloon door dividing it from the kids’ section just outside. There were no racks in the center of the room; everything in the horror section was kept on the walls. The lights were dimmer in here, the walls were painted black and festooned with cotton spider webs. In the center of the room was a black pedestal upon which a glass case rested. Inside the case was a miniature coffin, and inside the coffin was an animatronic Dracula puppet about the size of an eight-year-old boy, hooked up to a motion sensor so that whenever someone entered the room he would pop up and say something in a thick Romanian accent. I do remember being startled by it early on, but eventually the room became a comfort to me, its relative isolation and emptiness (I’m surprised, looking back, how few people entered that section) always made me feel at home while I looked over the horrifying scenes on display.

VHS cover.

One of those scenes was the cover to Graveyard Shift, which was burned into my memory much more strongly than the movie itself (though, as it turns out, I remembered the movie pretty accurately). It’s not the most inventive of covers; just a grinning skull in a miner’s hat, but to this day the sight of it conjures positive associations. The movie itself did not exactly set my world on fire, but it’s eternally mixed up with the emotions and sensations of that time in my life, and as such I think my opinion of it remains higher than yours. Logically I know the movie isn’t very good, but in my memories I always enjoy it more than it probably deserves. Not that I think it’s a bad movie; there’s actually quite a bit in here that I think is great. 

You recounted feeling repulsed by the film on your initial viewing, and that’s certainly understandable. The characters are almost uniformly unlikable, and the film is almost oppressively grimy, but I think that’s actually one of the movie’s greatest strengths. The short story gives the aura of sweaty nights doing dirty work with dirty people, and the film version translates that pretty accurately. It also grasps the concept of the ‘Stephen King small town’ better than most filmed versions of his works. Graveyard Shift was filmed in Harmony, Maine, with certain location shots made in Bangor, and the decision to film in the actual places Stephen King was writing about pays off great dividends. What we see of the small town in this film straddles that line between quaint and rundown that I associate with all of the small towns in Alaska I’ve visited or lived in. It’s also a pretty good representation of the background I always imagine when reading Stephen King’s books (from what I’ve seen and read, Maine and Alaska share many similarities, at least on a surface level).

The film goes a little overboard at times with the hostility of the locals towards Hall, but I think I can excuse that the same way I can excuse the broadness of the character work in some of King’s own writing. Giving the local mill employees anger towards Hall is a bit odd, given that in the story they seem to be friendly with him, and there are signs they actually respect him (certainly more than they respect Warwick, at least). There’s a bit where Hall orders food at the one diner in town, and someone has a dead rat delivered on his plate. Beyond being senseless, I just thought about how that restaurant would immediately be shut down for an inspection if someone were throwing around dead, possibly disease-ridden rats.

The one place the film really fails for me, though, is in the depiction of the rats. Once, while working a nighttime security job, I happened upon a rat large enough that at first I thought it was a kitten, or a puppy (certainly it seemed larger than the rodents I had been around at that point), and only as I drew closer did I realize what it was. This rat was crouched in shadow, and as I passed within two feet of it, it refused to budge. It just stared at me with its beady eyes. That was honestly unnerving, and made me understand how some people can fear rats. It’s what came to mind while I was reading the story, but in the film they just seemed cuddly. In the story, the rats are described in disgusting terms, and make for some squirm-inducing reading. In the film, however, they’re forced to use domesticated rats, and as someone who has owned rats in the past, I had trouble finding them imposing. Even when they gathered by the dozens and surrounded characters ominously, I couldn’t stop thinking about how cute they looked perched atop rafters. They use the usual tricks of filmmaking to make them look wild and scary; basically, they matted their fur with various liquids, but it was to no avail; those rats were just too adorable to find menacing. 

Leaving aside, for now, the larger vermin we’ll meet later on, how did the rats do for you in the film? Did they give you the heebie-jeebies, or the warm-and-fuzzies?

Original U.S. movie poster

Rik: Neither. My heebies weren’t jeebied and my fuzzies weren’t warmed. I have far more limited rat experience than you do, but I have held a few of them through my years. My brother, as a young adult, had a pet rat, and I did have the opportunity of getting to know him a bit on a personal level (got to know the rat as well). There was also a swell rat named Willie in a biology class in high school of whom I was fond. Because I had a dispute with the teacher over another matter, I was accused initially by her of the rat’s death when it was murdered – along with numerous fish and other creatures -- during the school year. I was totally innocent, and the true culprits were found out and expelled. But I still hated that teacher. (When she ran for city government a few years later, I voted against her, even though we were politically similar.) Taken on their own terms as individuals, I am as open to rats as any creature; I am not sure how I would react, though, in a situation where I was alone with a wild one in the dark, let alone being surrounded by hordes of them. I grew up with rat movies like Willard and Ben, along with assorted others, though I tended to side with the people who were friendly to the rats, and not to their victims. The rats in Graveyard Shift were just rats to me, and posed no real menace in my eyes. But I also knew that there was something bigger underneath the mill, and so that was the direction of the true horror of the story. Rats were really just the appetizers for the horror enthusiast’s palate, so to speak.

And rats had nothing to do with what repulsed me about the film. It was just a general, as you suggested, griminess that wore me down and kept me at arm’s length from the thing. This was at another decidedly more immature time, however; while I am no more grown-up when I wish to be, it is necessary now for me to try to automatically accept a film’s general setting and mood (when I indeed feel it is appropriate to the story) and not let my personal obsessions or denials affect the viewing. But in my younger days, an unappealing setting or even a detail such as costuming could turn me away from films at their outset (though this was a very inconsistent device that I employed, and I think that I often used it as an excuse to just not see certain films).

Setting aside my initial feelings towards the film, having seen it a couple times more now recently, I absolutely agree that if anything works about this film, it is the setting and atmosphere. The hot, fetid air of the textile mill and its denizens, both townies and ratties, and eventually, the presumably even worse conditions of the sub-basement, is tangible and unpleasant, but adds immeasurably to the film. 

Getting back to your first points, what did turn me off from the film far more than in the short story was indeed the overly pushy and often disgusting behavior of the small town's inhabitants towards Hall (except the ladies, of course). Even though I shouldn't do this, I often place myself in the same situation when I watch a film and ask what I would do when confronted with such behavior. The answer is almost always, "Get the fuck out of that town right now. Catch the first bus and just head out." Again, I know that this is an impossible stance in relation to watching simple characters in a simple movie entertainment, but as I have tried through much of my life, I feel it is just best to avoid people who are outright assholes in the first place, and have found that the most obvious way to avoid them is to not go to places that they frequent once you have discovered they are there.

But Hall sticks around. And they tease him and try to get him to react in some way to their assholery, and then they try to feed him a rat for dinner. I too had thought about the health board coming down on that bar/eatery, especially in a story where the plot hinges around a county ordinance to have the basement of the textile mill cleaned up or else. If they are so gung ho about a small town textile mill having safe working conditions, you would think they would be equally hardcore about a place that serves food. But the bartender/owner is likely to be on good footing with the assholes pulling the prank on Hall, and he’s not going to talk. Old boy networks, you know. They may not wish to shit where they eat, but you can sure serve a rat dinner to an out-of-towner who will likely have no one to back up his story if he chose to “rat” anyone out at city hall. To be sure, it is a weird, off-putting scene, one that I found personally disgusting due to the still-shocking memory of seeing the original Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in my youth.

Mr. Subtle as a Crutch, Brad Dourif.

Speaking of adding atmosphere to a killer rat movie, the always creepy Brad Dourif has a small role in Graveyard Shift as a professional exterminator. The role is not in the story, and he seems to have simply been added to give a little more horror street cred to the film. While Dourif, a personal favorite since Cuckoo’s Nest for me, has an extremely over-the-top manner to his acting most of the time, he does nicely fill the role of the probably unhinged but oddly dedicated (perhaps too dedicated) exterminator. The role almost seems inconsequential to the rest of the film, however, and feels almost like filler, meant to distract from the general plot just enough to throw us off from the film’s true direction. What are your thoughts on Mr. Dourif?

Aaron: Brad Dourif was the source of the largest disconnect between my memories of the film and the actual film itself. In my memory, “The Exterminator” (as he is billed in the opening credits) was a larger part of the movie, and I had vague recollections of him leading the surviving cast members through some subterranean tunnels. In fact, The Exterminator never interacts with anyone from the main cast outside of Warwick, and it’s entirely likely that Dourif never even met the rest of the actors. This happens a lot in low budget films that snag a recognizable name for their cast; the film can’t really afford to have the name actor on set for the entire shoot, and so they film a bunch of scenes with an often reduced crew and maybe one or two other members of the cast over a couple of days. These scenes rarely, if ever, intersect with the main plot in any meaningful way, and it’s always super-noticeable when a production is basically getting an actor to do them a favor. 

As for your question, my thoughts on Mr. Dourif remain the same every time I see him; he is a supremely welcome presence. Odd, intense, and watery-eyed, Brad Dourif brings a jolt of unpredictable energy to every scene he appears in, and genre filmmakers should thank the deity of their choosing that he apparently attacks even the most minor role in the most off-brand film with the enthusiasm of a stage actor tackling the works of Shakespeare. He can and does go over the top frequently, but there’s always a passion behind it that extends beyond mere scenery chewing. There’s always something unsettling and unwholesome about Brad Dourif (it’s no coincidence he’s known primarily for playing killers and slimeballs), and I can easily see him adding to the general sense of unpleasant griminess that soured you on this film way back when.

You mentioned already that his character and plotline are new to the film, and have no analog in the source material. I believe his involvement signifies the largest alteration of the source material. His efforts to rid the building of rats are especially notable, as the characters in the story quite pointedly don’t care about getting rid of the rats, but rather they just desire to get away from them. His scenes also add an oddly literal meaning to the short story’s title, as he meets his fateful end while searching for the source of the rats in a nearby, shockingly ruined cemetery.  You could say that the story also contains zero women, and certainly no love interests or feuds inspired by sexual jealousy, but their creation for the film is no great stretch of the imagination. It’s easy enough to imagine Hall becoming involved with a woman in the town, or that Warwick is a sexist creep.

Original DVD release.

It may be this very invention that heightens the sense of disconnection in Dourif’s scenes, because aside from them and the aforementioned female characters, Graveyard Shift stays pretty faithful to the source material. The film feels very much like a natural extension of the original’s 26 pages. Whereas many Stephen King adaptations seem to throw out most of the original plot and invent out of whole cloth a new story to support the ‘hook’ of the project, Graveyard Shift’s alterations seem to actually extend naturally from the original story. Sure, characters and plot details are created, and events in the story are expanded or heightened, as would be required for a feature film, but everything seems to build off of the short story’s skeletal structure. This is true in regards to details both small (most of the belligerent townies bear the names of people mentioned in the story) and large (Warwick mentions in the story that lights have been strung in the basement, while in the movie we actually get to see the poor man stringing those lights up, and the dismal fate that awaits him).

Not all of this works, of course. I never felt really involved in the struggles Hall faced in the town, for many of the reasons you already listed. Hall should just move on, there’s absolutely no reason he should stick around that grimy little town. When we meet him he’s just arrived in town and is met with open hostility from the male population and smug disdain from, apparently, the only person in the entire town who is hiring. Plus I never cared about who was sleeping with whom and who was jealous because of it. Clearly drama needs to come from somewhere, but none of this was very interesting or unique. In fact, just having seen the film recently, I’m finding it hard to remember the details of these plotlines. All of these films feel like what they are; time fillers to keep us occupied until the next death scene.

There’s one other big change to the story, of course, which is the ending. In the short story, we get Hall urging on Warwick to his death, only to succumb shortly thereafter to the attentions of a mutated bat. In the movie there is, apparently, only one large mutated rat/bat creature, for which the rats we’ve seen so far are merely harbingers. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they seem to hang around the large creature in hopes of getting at the leftover scraps of whatever it happens to kill. In the film, the ending starts out following the one in the story, but diverges pretty strongly once Warwick seems to enter a ‘Nam flashback and begins painting his face with mud from the tunnel floors. In the film neither Warwick nor Hall react the way they do in the story, and the film ends in one of those mad dashes through byzantine caverns while trying to avoid the killer. 

I know you weren’t creeped out or charmed by the rats in the films, but I’m curious how you felt about the final monstrosity on display; the giant bat/rat. It’s a practical effect, and plenty gruesome looking, but it also failed to excite my more discerning adult eyes. I don’t actually remember being wowed by at as a kid, either, but I certainly remembered it being more distinct and, well, cooler than it is. It’s a bit too asymmetrical, and rubbery, like the entire puppet was melted a bit before being put in front of the camera. Of course, it is a monster, and in concept I think it’s pretty cool, so it’s not a total loss for me. But how did it stack up with you?

Rik: Speaking of Warwick’s ‘Nam flashback (which I didn’t really pick up on until you mentioned it) – I just thought he was doing what jerks consumed with their own testosterone do when put in such a situation – The Exterminator has a line in reference to his own Vietnam experiences that might be my favorite line in the film. He yells, “I ain’t talkin’ one of those burning babies fuck-ups played by Bruce Dern!!” It’s exactly the sort of line that you would give to somebody like Brad Dourif to knock out of the park (though I do wonder somewhat if it came out of an ad-lib).

The giant mutant bat-rat indeed looks very much like an oversized puppet at nearly every turn. As a puppeteer, I appreciate that it appears to be pretty functional and generally well designed; but how good is that design if it never truly attains life of its own for the viewer? But as a monster guy of long standing, I can appreciate it a bit more. It makes its rounds and has a couple of decent attack scenes. But the giant mutant bat-rat does seems to roam about outside of the sub-basement and attack people in the early parts of the film, even in the upper levels of the textile mills, so it does make me wonder exactly why it was important for the lock scene to be included in the film, beyond adding to the atmosphere. If it is not keeping the creature in, then surely it is to keep others out? So was the person who put it there even aware of the creature? Without the Varney reference that is included in the story, does anything about the revelation of the sub-basement mean anything, beyond giving the character a watery, nasty tunnel system to run around and die inside?


Closing Statements

Aaron: Honestly, this story did not need to be told in feature length. Not only does the expanded length sap some of the grisly energy of the short story, the film completely shies away from the one true source of mystery that should have been explored further: that strange lock and the mysterious Elias Varney. However, if you were to edit this down to an hour-long episode of an anthology show, I think you’ve got a pretty great short film. Cut out almost everything not happening in the mill, because it’s garbage, and stick with the disgustingly sweaty work environments and the revolting mutated vermin, and you’ve got a winner.

Your contextualizing of the bat-rat monster in terms of your love of puppeteering and monsters strikes me as a decent and more forgiving lens through which to view the film. It occurs to me that Graveyard Shift functions pretty much as a throwback to third-tier monster flicks of the ‘40s and ‘50s. It’s no Them!, but maybe closer to Tarantula. The type of film I’m generally more than happy to spend a lazy afternoon with. So why, then, don’t I afford Graveyard Shift the same status? As it turns out, after some reflection, I do.

I do not own Graveyard Shift, and I doubt I’ll ever pay to rent it again, but it’s not a movie I would turn my nose up at watching again. If it came on cable or streaming on whichever service I have at the time, I’d probably sit down for it again. If I view it as a faintly retro monster flick, with a melodramatic story I don’t care about (seriously, we’ve barely mentioned the non-rat plot, and I can’t muster the energy to discuss it any further) but a cool monster with some adequately bloody kills, Graveyard Shift becomes a pretty decent horror movie. Nothing amazing, nothing I’d really recommend to most people, but worth your time if you’ve set your expectations accordingly. In the meantime, however, I’ll stick to the story, which is at least brief enough to enjoy in just a few minutes.

Rik: I don’t know if I am ready to commit to calling Graveyard Shift a "pretty decent horror movie," but it is certainly better, on monster terms, than I remember it. The movie overall is also certainly far better than some of the films we will be tackling in the months ahead in this column. But on a level with Tarantula? Heretic… I would go more for The Woman Eater or Zombies of Mora Tau.

Aaron: I felt Tarantula was a good example, because it’s got a great monster (though superior special effects to Graveyard Shift), and a melodramatic plot that I cannot begin to care about. But again, it seems I might have slightly more positive associations with this film than you do.

Rik: It is indeed strange how we managed to avoid discussion of most of the sub-plots and shenanigans (apart from the rat dinner plate) going on in the movie that are not really related to the original story elements. They are by far the least interesting bits of the film, and so perhaps it is fine we have glossed over them, except there is one thing I would like to mention. As I hinted at much earlier, it is interesting that the character of Wisconsky in the story, a male, has not only been given a gender switch in the movie, but has also been made the love interest of Hall. The relationship goes far enough that Hall is protective of her until near the end of the film, but still seems to be a half-hearted element and not nearly as developed as it should be.

The equally subtle apple-eating stylings of Stephen Macht.

I will say that after seeing it anew a couple of times, I have had a turnaround on the acting of Stephen Macht in Graveyard Shift. I knew who the actor was coming into the film the first time – I was and am a massive fan of The Monster Squad, where Macht plays the policeman who likes to watch drive-in monster movies with his kid from their roof – but Macht’s forced New England accent annoyed me so deeply it pretty much made me write the film off immediately and probably made the film more of a disappointment to me than it probably would have been without The Monster Squad floating through my head. Now, however, I kind of like Macht in the role; he seems at one with the film’s atmosphere, and as far as a committed villain goes, he is certainly up to the task. I still think some of the character’s motivations are not thought through enough at screenwriting level, but as far as acting is concerned, I am at peace with Macht in the role.

One last thing: the song over the closing credits. The 1980s and 1990s were a glorious time if you liked really shitty closing credits songs, often using remixing, scratching, or hip-hop styling. Graveyard Shift closes with a remix using ridiculous quotes from the body of the film, tumbling haphazardly over a bubbling bass line and bursts of other instrumentation. I suppose that if you actually got caught up in the movie by some miracle, this might be a fun digestif, but I find it very silly and that, like many such songs, somewhat damages whatever atmosphere the film did manage to build. (Then again, maybe I am just taking everything a bit too seriously.)

Aaron: I cannot believe I forgot to say something about that shitty song. That song leaves me fairly speechless; it’s so ridiculous, and so divorced from the preceding movie’s tone that I can’t imagine the discussion that went into its inclusion. I can’t imagine who it was for, or what the intention was. It seems to belong to a different movie altogether. Tonally it makes no sense, because the preceding movie is fairly light on humor, but then the song isn’t very funny either, and doesn’t seem to be trying for humor. It has the appearance of a joke, but it isn’t really. It sort of fits with the film’s final shot, which is a sign for the textile mill saying ‘under new management’, but the film up to that point hadn’t indulged in any of those winking Tales From The Crypt-style flashes of humor (although, clearly, the film would have been much more memorable if it had had a sense of humor about itself). In fact, up until the literal final second, the film is a pretty grim affair, and the ending is dark enough that a quick joke and cheap novelty song feels like a vast misunderstanding of the material.

This is such a minor story, and such a forgettable film, and every time I think we’re done talking, something else comes up. Am I going to spend the rest of my life writing only about Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift? Will I begin working on our next piece, only to look up hours later and discover I’ve written seven pages on the wonders of Kelly Wolf’s midriff baring shirts? This movie and story have actually risen slightly in my estimation, yet for my own sanity I think I’m ready to be done with both of them for the foreseeable future.

*****

Rik: Thanks for checking out our first edition of We Who Watch Behind the Rows. Next time, we will be discussing another Stephen King story from his Night Shift collection, Night Surf. While Night Surf has never been turned into a feature film, it has been adapted numerous times into short, independent films through King's unique Dollar Babies program. We will review a few of those adaptations as well as dig into the story's surprising connections to his later classic novel, The Stand. See you then!