Warning: This review contains spoilers for The Last Shift (2014).
Anthony DiBlasi’s The Last Shift premiered in 2014. Shift was a low-budget horror with a raw, authentic grittiness to every shot. DiBlasi’s ability to build tension and deliver spine-chilling scares was highly praised, and the film gained cult status for its twist ending. In the nine years since, DiBlasi has reimagined and tweaked the story into Malum, which follows Officer Loren (Jessica Sula), a rookie cop taking the last shift at a crumbling, mold-infested police station in a crime-ridden Louisville, Kentucky. While he’s gained a higher budget, expanded the original plot of Shift, and offers an entertaining, gore-soaked fright-fest, I can’t help but wonder, was this remake really necessary?
Malum opens with a massacre at the aforementioned police station by Loren’s father, Will. After helping three girls escape from a vicious, demon-worshiping cult, Will is plagued with nefarious visions. Unable to cope with the diabolic whispers in his ear, he uses a shotgun to cravenly gun down his fellow officers and friends before turning the barrel on himself.
Years later, Loren visits his grave with her despondent, alcoholic mother, Diane (Candice Coke). Loren, estranged and bitter towards her reckless mother, ignores her plea to not take the last shift. Loren navigates the dark, foreboding streets of Louisville and reports for duty.
She is quickly taken aback by the last remaining officer at the station, who appears to be fighting with an unseen presence. He writes it off when she questions him. He scoffs at her for being Will’s child, gruffly barks at her to not bother him unless it’s an emergency, and leaves Loren to her shift. Loren swallows the abuse, takes a seat at the station desk, and waits out the night.
It’s not long before supernatural events begin to occur. A towering homeless man breaks into the station, a pig is left at the doorstep with a demonic symbol painted on its back, and Loren begins to have disturbing visions that she can’t differentiate from reality. When she calls the new station for backup, they tell her it’s near impossible—the streets of Louisville are brimming with riots, and the very cult that her father brought down is going to make a return that night. As nightmarish apparitions increasingly plague her, Loren searches for the connection between her father and the cult, much may prove deeper than she initially believed.
While I admire DiBlasi’s creativity in the expansion of Loren and her family’s story, I couldn’t help but compare Malum to the masterful simplicity of Shift. Malum, while eerie and effective in its gore, SFX, demon design, and jump scares, gets tangled in its own story. There’s no distinct cue that what is reality and what is not, or what really happened to the Loren family. Bringing more detail into the plot may have been a misstep here. DiBlasi shows us too much and often, the violence feels executed purely for shock value. The raw, low-budget horror aesthetic that Shift lovingly nurtured is gone—Malum offers the ambiance of high production value, thus extinguishing the grittiness of the original. The biggest miss here is the loss of Shift’s ending, wherein Loren kills the HAZMAT team scheduled to clean out the police station, mistaking them for specters in a mold-induced hallucination.
Despite my critique, I do believe Malum is a creepy, well-made flick, a must-have for a scary movie night with a bucket of popcorn in your lap. Though I remain in my stance that Shift was the last of its kind, a grisly, eerie horror feature with little money that made a big impact— bigger than any remake can.
Malum
2023
dir. Anthony DiBlasi
92 min.
Opens at Cinema Salem Friday, 3/31
