MY CALL: Intense, mean, dire and very, very, very graphically macabre at every chunky gory opportunity. I loved this film. MORE MOVIES LIKE Malum: Last Shift (2014).
Very much like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (1987), Malum is writer/director Anthony DiBlasi’s (Dread, Last Shift, The Profane Exhibit, Cassadaga) reimagined Last Shift (2014) with the same plot but a different cast. But, full disclosure, I have not seen Last Shift (2014) since I initially reviewed it almost ten years ago. So I cannot offer a good side-by-side comparison of the two films.
From its very first scene, this movie makes it abundantly clear that devil worshippers and Satanic ritual will be thematically important. Our cold open presents a cop brutally murdering his fellow cadets and then committing suicide to join his ‘master.’ The exploding face gore from the gunshot is spectacular. A year later, his daughter Jessica (Jessica Sula; Split) is a rookie police officer preparing for her first shift. Upon her request, this first shift is standing watch by herself overnight in the near-abandoned police station where her father’s massacre transpired. Young, attractive and perhaps too meek for conflict, she strikes me as no more than tenderized final girl victim bait for whatever evils herein lurk. She is left with one instruction: “stay out of holding (cells).”
Without easing us into a false sense of security, our cadet encounters all manner of flickering lights, strange noises, momentary sightings of another uniformed cadet in the shadows, objects moving on their own, a disturbed hobo (Kevin Wayne; ), a manic hooker who hears voices, slamming doors and mysterious threatening phone calls. Among the disordered melee of distractions, no single event seems nearly as dire as expected… at first. But they build in magnitude and seem to create a vile synergy projecting an ever more infernal atmosphere. Yeah, it gets creepier. But even more so it gets… more Hellish. Like Jessica’s own personal Hell curated perfectly for her suffering.
With all the supernatural and weird distracting goings-on on Jessica doesn’t seem to acknowledge how weird this all is until she’s in too deep. It’s like she never gets a break long enough to realize how eff’d up this all is. Every encounter Jessica has is suspiciously weird, and things get yet weirder when she finds a flash drive with Satanic videos.
Great gore in this movie! Really fleshy and nasty. A brutally gory face-smashing scene, another shot-gunned goretastic face, even more super gory chunky faces, and multiple events of sloppy stabby murder round out a lot of good gore. The gory stylings really play well into the demonic themes well. It’s really gnarly and deliciously gross! A hanging scene was truly amazing. Hanged by some supernatural means, the victim’s fingers are scythed from her hand, her eyes grotesquely bulge, and her body drops from her squeezed and sundered neck in a pinata-like dowsing of blood. Wow.
Just like Last Shift (2014), the cultists at the end were next level off-putting and unlike anything I’ve seen in movies before. As if imagined through a Lovecraftian lens, they are inhuman and slimy, their hoods are saturated in their evil ectoplasm, and their eyes and skin are not of this world.
With all the jumpy shenanigans, goopy splattered bloody murder, and wildly unrelated goings-on, this movie feels like an incredibly well-made B-movie. It’s entertaining, but not necessarily interesting (since there’s no mystery to it, only lunacy).
I’ve gotta’ say, this is pretty cool. I definitely favor this to the original. Admittedly, the original just seemed to rub me the wrong way. And even though this is quite similar to the original, I feel the staging and execution of the storytelling along with the very ambitiously magnified and inspired gore effects both really elevate this well above its source material.
Likely somewhat Hellraiser-inspired in the best ways possible, the sum of macabre visuals of this film are amazing. Let’s please give Anthony DiBlasi all the money so he can continue to make graphic, inspired horror for the depraved masses.
