Worth Mentioning - As Cool as a Corpse

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

A couple different night shift stories.

NIGHT SHIFT (2023)

There have been multiple films, shorts, and TV shows that have used the title Night Shift over the years – so many, in fact, that it’s one of those titles that should be retired for a while. I’m not sure why someone would still want to use the title at this point, but I am sure that most of the things that have called Night Shift could have been called something else that would have made them stand out from the pack a bit more. Despite the overuse of the title, a new movie called Night Shift has just made its way out into the world... and this one is a decent thriller, if you don’t mind jumping over some logic hurdles.

Written and directed by Benjamin China and Paul China, a.k.a. The China Brothers, the film stars Phoebe Tonkin as a young woman named Gwen – and Tonkin does a great job of carrying large portions of the film entirely on her shoulders, even if her natural Australian accent occasionally emerges while she’s speaking her American character’s dialogue. The story begins with Gwen arriving at a desert motel so she can begin working her new job: the night shift at the All Tucked Inn. First, she gets a walkthrough from her boss Teddy Miles, with Lamorne Morris delivering such a fun, amusing performance that most viewers will be left wishing there was a lot more Teddy in the movie. But Teddy heads out after a while, leaving Gwen to work the front desk in this creepy place by herself. And by the way, not only is the motel infested with rats and roaches, but it’s also said to be one of the most haunted locations around.

Sure enough, as the night goes on, Gwen experiences some very strange, scary things. Eventually, there’s even talk that an escaped mental patient – someone Gwen has history with – might be lurking around the property. She also has some interactions with a runaway played by Madison Hu and a comically ridiculous couple played by Patrick Fischler and Lauren Bowles.

While it’s only about Gwen working a night at the All Tucked Inn, this Night Shift has plenty going on in it. The story takes twists and turns and remains interesting throughout. The problem is, when all of the answers are revealed at the end, it just brings up several logic questions that the China Brothers didn’t bother to deal with. So you might be left wondering how multiple things in the story were possible... but if you can overlook those things, Night Shift does making for an entertaining 83 minute viewing experience.

SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK (1991)

Stephen King got in on the Night Shift title action way back in 1978, when that’s the name he slapped onto his first short story collection – a collection that included the stories that have given us such films as Graveyard Shift, The Mangler, The Boogeyman, and Children of the Corn (not to mention TV projects like Chapelwaite and Gray Matter) over the years. The 1991 film Sometimes They Come Back is another adaptation of a Night Shift story. Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal wrote the screenplay for this one, then the story was brought to the screen by director Tom McLoughlin, the filmmaker who was responsible for Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI – the movie I credit with making me a horror fan back in the ‘80s.

Tim Matheson stars as Jim Norman, whose family moved away from his hometown back in 1963, when he was nine-years-old. Now it’s 1990 and he’s taken a teaching job in the town, so he moves back into his long-abandoned childhood home with his wife Sally (Brooke Adams) and son Scott (Robert Hy Gorman of Leprechaun). From the beginning, it’s clear that coming back to this town was a bad idea, because Jim keeps having flashbacks to the death of his brother Wayne (played in those flashbacks by Chris Demetral), who was murdered by a gang of four greasers while walking Jim (the younger version is played by Zachary Ball) through a local train tunnel. That was the event that drove the Norman family out of town... although they didn’t have to worry about most of those greasers being brought to justice, because their 1955 Chevy was smashed by a train immediately after they killed Wayne. Three of them died in that crash.

Of course, since this is a King story, Jim has to worry about more than just bad memories. His students start getting murdered, and each time one of them dies, they’re replaced in the class by one of the greasers. Richard (Robert Rusler of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2), Vinnie (Nicholas Sadler), David (Bentley Mitchum of Demonic Toys), somehow they’ve all been resurrected as supernatural beings. They’re out to get Jim – and he needs to find a way to stop them without seeming like a total maniac, since as far as the school board is concerned, these guys are just regular students. And yes, the fourth greaser, Carl (played by Don Ruffin in flashback) does get drawn into the 1990 end of the story – and when he shows up, he’s played by Newhart’s William Sanderson!

Sometimes They Come Back is an interesting troubling story, and McLoughlin brought it to the screen in an entertaining way. This movie was originally a CBS TV movie, so it’s not as intense as it could have been otherwise, but it still makes for an enjoyable, occasionally unnerving viewing experience. The “lost brother” aspect also gives it an emotional edge that has always gotten to me. Since this first aired when I was 7 years and was released on VHS sometime soon after, this is one of those movies I watched during the first few years of my horror fandom. I liked it then, and I like it now, more than thirty years down the line. It’s a good supernatural horror story that has stuck with me for decades – but nothing in it disturbs me as much as the realization that I’m further removed from my first viewing of this movie than the Jim Norman character is from the death of his brother in the movie.