Last Shift

 A rookie cop (Juliana Harkavy) on her very first day is assigned the task of looking after a decommissioned police station - the Last Shift, you could say, before disposals turn up to get rid of some hazardous waste and the building can be fully shut down.

 It's a one crazy night film in a horror key, in other words, with the poor officer having to deal with escalating weirdness as the night unspools. Doors open, things move on their own, TVs turn to creepy channels... Poltergeist-style stuff - literally, at one point, when the ghosts decide to pile up office chairs in one of the rooms. 

 It's indicative of Last Shift's problems that that particular scene in Poltergeist was played for laughs; Here, it's dead serious... just another one of the low-level scares, jump scares and mild creepiness that constitutes most of what passes for a plot here. To be perfectly honest, I didn't find this movie very compelling even before the nature of the haunting - and its connection to our protagonist - becomes clear and the film lost me completely. It's all well-trod stuff, competently made but not enough to make it interesting.

Boot visits one nasty kindergarten

 There's no complaints about its quality; Director Anthony DiBlasi and his crew, working off what's very clearly a limited budget, keep the supernatural phenomena coming at a constant clip, leaving the door open for everything to be just in the rookie's mind. It's all done with energy and a little panache, and that goes a long way.

 All that effort does make the more low-key stuff work pretty well: being alone on a creepy institutional building is scary (and relatable) enough, and the atmosphere is strong. For all the craziness to come, a couple of encounters with a deranged homeless man end up striking the hardest.
 The sound design is outstanding and there are some good makeup effects later on. The acting is... variable, but it's mostly a one-woman show and luckily Harkavi does a pretty good job; She's believable in the role and has an engaging screen presence. And the action, simple and (very) limited as it is, is well staged and manages a great sense of immediacy.

 Everything above makes it all the more disappointing when the script (by DiBlasi and Scott Poiley) gets less interesting as it goes on, up to the point where the film just ends up being a Blumhouse-like barrage of clichés built around a subject matter that I never found all that scary to begin with.

 DiBlasi is an interesting director - he worked with Clive Barker developing a series of projects, and his first movie was an adaptation of the short story Dread (which I remember being just OK). Figures - there's something pretty Cenobite-y about a couple one of the creatures here. 

 Even if his other films don't sound very appealing to me, the guy's clearly got chops. What most strikes me, though, is that he remade Last Shift nine years later (as Malum) to escape the VoD ghetto. It sounds like too faithful a retread to bother with - this movie's problems are not the sort that will be fixed by throwing more money at them.