Malum

6.5/10

In this remake of director/co-writer Anthony DiBlasi's 2014 film Last Shift, rookie police officer Jessica Loren (played by Split's Jessica Sula) gets herself assigned to watch over the night the old, practically abandoned police station that's being closed down. She's intentionally there as she's trying to investigate the death of her father. Soon, strange things start happening...

What this movie is good at is is providing unsettling, creepy stuff. There's some things that'll definitely stick in your memory. I believe one reason DiBlasi decided to pull a Hitchcock and made the rare choice of remaking his own movie is that he was able to play with a bigger budget. (When I heard this was a remake, I watched the original first because I was kinda fascinated with what the differences would be between the two.) The original while having decent special effects was clearly made on the cheap and took place entirely within one filming location. Here, DiBlasi is able to pull off more. There's a couple visual scares I miss from Last Shift, but there are also a few originals here that really leave an impression.

Going back to the shooting location, Last Shift's police station was a really well lit affair (again probably a budget thing), here it's the opposite, and DiBlasi makes strong use of the unknown that lurks in the darkness. Also, I really liked the front door area to the place they shot at. Has a distinct look. 

This movie is effectively scary, but the plot is... debatable (much like the original). The script does do a better job of explaining why some things were happening in the first film (for instance, in the original it's a coincidence that Jessica is assigned to the station her father worked at.) However, changes to the story bring up a bunch of brand new plot holes, stuff that'll make you say "Wait, what? But...?"  

Casting is predominantly stronger than the first, there's a few performances I preferred from the original but on the whole we've got a higher class of actors. Though I feel Loren's superior Officer Grip Cohen to still be more of a plot device than a realistic character (sadly, his dialogue was largely untouched from Last Shift), Britt George's performance as him is a lot more tolerable. There is one actor replacing their role from the first: Natalie Victoria (the director's wife). I'm so glad they had her ditch her lousy southern accent this time around.

This was one of those movies that's hard to rate. If you love scary stuff, you'll probably like this. But if you hate it when horror movie plots get super vague, this probably won't be for you.