By Nia Edwards-Behi
Anthony DiBlasi is a name I’ve often heard when people talk about decent indie horror filmmaking, but I’ve not managed to see any of his previous films (Dread, Cassadaga) before Last Shift. I had few expectations approaching the film then, either positive or negative, and it seems having watched the film, I still feel much the same.
Rookie cop Jessica Loren (Juliana Harkavy) has drawn the short straw: her first shift is to stay keeping watch at an all but shut police station, in order to guard the hazardous materials which are due to be collected that night, while all the rest of the area’s police have already moved into their new station. Alone in the station, she soon starts to hear strange noises, and receives incessant phone calls from a distressed girl, even though emergency calls should already have been re-routed to the new station. Increasingly frightened but determined to impress on her first day – and do her dead-cop father proud – she doesn’t leave her post and instead faces a night with the king of hell, via a long-dead cult leader and his followers.
I think Last Shift is one of those films I wanted to like more. It’s a nice premise, Harkavy does a great job of getting us on-side with Loren, the special effects are great, I jumped a few times, the villain is fun, and certainly once the film reaches its final 15 minutes or so, it’s really excellent. Unfortunately for me the preceding 70 minutes didn’t really succeed in capturing my attention, despite the many strengths. DiBlasi is certainly a good director – he makes nice use of the police station location – and there is much skill on display. I think where the film is let down is simply in its structure. The first half an hour or so involves a lot of repetition. Loren hears something and investigates, but finds nothing. Loren thinks she sees something (or often we are shown something behind Loren that she doesn’t see) only for nothing to be there. She receives a phone call and can’t do anything about it. A bit too much time is spent on this sort of tension-building and as such it becomes quite ineffectual.
This weakness in the storytelling is exemplified by the character of Marigold (Natalie Victoria), an apparent prostitute taking a smoke break outside the station who Loren tells to get on her way. But wait, there’s more! She’s an exposition prostitute! Marigold fills us in on the history of the Manson-like cult whose murderous members killed themselves in the station. There’s nothing wrong with the dialogue in the scene, nor the performance, but it’s just so clumsy in the broader structure and narrative that it highlights the fact that if you’re not being scared by the repetitive and convoluted jump scares, then there’s not actually much else going on until a character appears to spell it out (later, there’s exposition cop-checking-on-the-rookie, too).
Having said that, I did say the last 15 minutes were excellent. They are. That’s when things really go crazy, and I would have liked if more of the film had been like that, rather than working on building tension that just doesn’t, for me, work. The make-up effects here are excellent, as are the rather demonic and abject designs of the things that Loren sees. The film’s very ending feels a little bit like an easy way out, but it’s not entirely unsatisfying, either.
In some ways I was reminded of Brian O’Malley’s Let Us Prey, a film which sees a demonic stranger in a remote police station slowly get inside the heads of everyone else there. Let Us Prey also has its faults, no doubt, but for me it’s a more successful film because it doesn’t rely on the same sort of ‘set-up, scare, nothing’ formula that takes up so much time in Last Shift, and countless other horror films. Had Last Shift made a bit more of its ‘king of hell’ premise, past it just looking cool and allowing for some Manson-esque craziness, then it could have been a much more interesting film. While Last Shift might have left me cold, I didn’t feel like watching it had been an entire waste of time. I’ll certainly keep an eye out for what DiBlasi does next.
Last Shift is out on DVD on 18th January, from Matchbox Films.