Malum: Same Shift, Different Day
Malum (2024)
Directed by Anthony DiBlasi
Starring Jessica Sula, Natalie Victoria, and Clarke Wolfe
Some of my best movie theater experiences have come from watching low-budget horror films on Thursday night premieres, having seen only the poster and keeping my “Optimum Immersion” intact. Over the years, a few of those films even made it onto my top films of the year list. Unfortunately, Malum won’t be one of them.
My wife (username YouDontKnowShit) and I arrived at an empty theater, sat in the back, and prepared for another opening-night horror film experience. As soon as the found footage appeared after the previews, my brain switched into detective mode. “OK, so this is one of those found footage homages to classics like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Quarantine (2008), and more specifically V/H/S (2012). Can we make it through an hour and a half of artifacts added digitally, scan lines, and glitches?” To our benefit, the satanic ritual on the screen lasted just a few minutes, and we were quickly treated to crystal-clear, high-definition drone shots of an unnamed East Coast city, followed by our protagonist.
Jessica Sula plays a rookie cop on her first day, left alone to hold down an old police station while the rest of the force deals with a day of chaos and violence. My brain switched back into detective mode: “This seems familiar,” I thought. When a basketball bounced ominously down the hallway, I turned to my wife and said, “Baby, I swear to God, I’ve seen this movie before.” She rolled her eyes and, not bothering to whisper since we were the only ones in the theater, replied, “You said this is opening night—how could you have seen it?”
As the next 10 minutes unfolded, the film played out exactly how my mind told me it would. I started losing my grip on reality. Did that satanic ritual work? Was I stuck in a loop of self-doubt and destruction? Was the dark lord of the nether regions messing with my head?
Nope. It turns out I was watching a “reimagining” of The Last Shift (2014) from the same director. I had slogged through that one on Amazon Prime with fellow critic Peter Cameron about six months ago. Anthony DiBlasi is no Hitchcock. Sure, this version is an improvement over the original, but both are still nearly unwatchable.
Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was a masterpiece of color and suspense, featuring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. It built on the success of his original (1934), amplifying the tension and spectacle. DiBlasi? Not so much. While Malum does improve upon The Last Shift with clearer dark scenes, more believable gore, and some legitimately impressive practical creature designs, the hour-and-a-half runtime is a slog, and the hallucination vs. reality trope wears thin fast.
Jessica Sula does her best to convey terror, fear, and insanity, but the rest of the cast is little more than cardboard cutouts of past horror film characters. Her efforts weren’t enough to keep the audience engaged—though, let’s be honest, the audience was just my wife and me. Judging by this empty showing, Malum will likely follow this trend for the rest of its (presumably short) theatrical run.
Grade: If Hitchcock’s remake was a B and an A, respectively, then DiBlasi’s is an F- and an F… respectively.