What possesses a director to remake their own work?
Surely the very notion of going back over old ground smacks of a lack of artistic merit, but more filmmakers have tried it that you may think after all, what are Evil Dead 2, Phantasm II, Crank: High Voltage and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer but Sam Raimi, Don Coscerelli, Neveldine/Taylor and Shinya Tsukamoto reyreding their steps with more experience and more cash to play with. Hell, even more “serious” auteurs such as Michael Haneke, Michael Mann and even Alfred Hitchcock have had another crack at older material with Funny Games, L.A. Takedown/Heat and The Man That Knew Too Much.
With all that being said, the decision of Anthony DiBlasi to remake/reimagine/re-whatever-the next-buzzword-for-making-the same-film-is-at-the-moment his 2014 chiller, Last Shift, only after a little under ten years after it first came out seemed a little strange, but if the guy wanted to replay his greatest hits with bigger scope and better effects, I guess I’m game.
Rookie officer Jessica Loren is about to start her first shift on the force and has requested that she is the one to baby sit a newly decommissioned police station on her lonesome. We find that she took this rather shitty assignment because a year earlier, after helping bring a murderous cult called The Flock, to justice, her father one day just suddenly up and shoots two colleagues before turning the shotgun on himself and Jessica and her alcoholic mother have struggled to make sense of it ever since.
Right from the get go, the night looks to be like it’s going to be an utter bastard as not only does Officer Loren start getting crank calls, someone chains a pig to the outside of the building as some sort of weird prank and she has a strange run-in with a delusional vagrant. However, matters take an even more sinister turn when the untested rookie starts having violent visions of hanged cult members and a strange box found in her father’s locker reveals that she might not know the true story of what actually happened between her father and the Low God worshiping cult leader, John Malum.
As the night goes on, the stakes raise alarmingly. Jessica gets a call claiming that one of the survivors saved by her father a year ago has been kidnapped and she becomes convinced that other cult members have managed to gain entrance to the building, however, no matter who she calls for assistance, none appears to come.
As a memory stick starts confirming her worst fears, the visions get even worse as she fends off assaults from bag-headed demons and a partially eaten girl with a caved in face – but soon a sickening question begins to form: what if it was ordained that she be here this fateful night? Good luck clocking off from this shift.
For anyone who hasn’t seen Anthony DiBlasi’s Last Shift, Malum should prove to be a nice little shocker with solid production values, some dependable jump scares and some nifty looking demons as it seeming takes the basic concepts of both John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 and Prince Of Darkness and then sprinkles a liberal helping of Clive Barker right in at the end. The direction is good, the performances decent and its slickly shot with a nice amount of polish to highlight the grungier aspects of the film that’s both pleasing and upsetting to the eye. In fact, if I’d come into Malum blind, it would most likely have scored a more than healthy four stars instead of a more subdued three and the reason for its downgrade in rating is painfully simple – if you’ve seen Last Shift, you’ve literally seen it all before.
To cut through the bullshit, to call Malum a reimagining is somewhat fucking laughable as the term usually suggest that while the basic concept is the same, the details are usually quite different. However, as DiBlasi picks his way through the opening act, you realise that the changes are either merely cosmetic (Jessica Loren is now a different race, the station is bigger) or slight tweaks to the original plot (Jessica’s father now commits murder/suicide). Aside from that the film’s opening hour is pretty much the same as the original – Jessica is obsessed with her father’s death, she’s greeted at the station by a crusty, verbally abusive superior, her evening is disturbed by a urinating tramp and some major plot points are filled in by a passing prostitute who happened to be there the night John Malum and two of his followers hung themselves and after a while you begin to wonder why anyone (especially yourself) even bothered.
What’s worse, some of the changes the director has made end up actually being inferior to the choices made in the individual. Juliana Harkavy’s Jessica was a far more capable heroine which made her eventual corruption all the more tragic, Jessica Sula’s Jessica 2.0 us more wide-eyed an innocent, giving her a lamb to the slaughter feel that admittedly feels appropriate, but is also a step back from the original portrayal.
DiBlasi is obviously relishing having a slightly larger canvas to play with (this station even has a fucking basketball court), but the fact that even some of the scares remain exactly the same is somewhat inexcusable. The early, skin-crawling moment where Jessica locks herself in a pitch black cell with the mumbling tramp, only for a third person to suddenly pick up her torch is lifted wholesale from Last Shift, as are other beats throughout the movie.
It’s a shame, because as a filmmaker, DiBlasi obviously upped his game in the last nine or so years and the newer version has much cooler monsters to play with, such as a climactic appearance by the Lovecrafian Old God who has an awesome, rustic Cenobite feel about him. However, even this weirdly works against Malum, as the stark, washed out, almost digital-looking style of Last Shift is far more unnerving that the rich colours and inky blacks that are presented here and it feels more like a traditional film than the jittery, almost experimental experience that preceded it.
If it sounds like I’m being overly harsh on Malum, I’ll happily concede that you probably should whack on another star to my rating if you haven’t seen DiBlasi’s earlier effort, but for the rest of us, the movie frustrates by refusing to deviate from the original opening half and not forging it’s own path to its hellish destination. The result is a reimagining that comes up noticably short of imagination…
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