Malum is a remake of Last Shift (by the same filmmakers, no less), and while I have watched both, I find my favor leaning toward the former. Malum takes the low-budget, high-concept world of its predecessor, subtly and overtly expanding the world (an empty police station that becomes a rookie cop’s portal to a living Hell) while amplifying the nightmarish imagery to an unsettling degree.
We’ve seen plenty of movies where malfunctioning flashlights in darkened corridors lead to screechy-strings jump-scares, but the sequence where our heroine is besieged by a seemingly endless succession of sack-headed cultists is terrifying stuff.
Part of me wanted to comment on the fact that the good folks at Terror Vision, in an effort to expand the reach of their small-staffed yet big-visioned boutique label, recently cut a deal with Wal-Mart to stock Malum online and in their brick-and-mortar stores.
While I haven’t seen one at any of my local W-Ms, I admire the effort to spread the influence of not only Malum, but their label in general. The irony of stocking a movie with cover art none-too-subtly echoing a pentagram in a chain that’s been known to censor explicit song lyrics or rename movies to allow their sale (2019’s Satanic Panic was shorn its association with the supreme ruler of the underworld for its Wal-Mart run).
Doubly ironic in that two decades ago, I was one of Those People who railed against the gargantuan retailer as a harbinger of doom for small businesses in rural and suburban areas. But when I consider the fact that a lot of the small businesses I patronized so long ago are still standing (thriving, in some cases), and that W-M is becoming one of the last major retailers where a guy like me can go in and pick up a new-release Blu-ray, brings me to the conclusion that life is too short (and filled with enough tragic irony) for me to hold an elitist grudge.
Even more ironically, however, is that, while browsing W-M’s website for Malum (the movie), I stumbled across Malum (the soundtrack, by the aptly-named Samuel Laflamme), and simply had to pick it up.
The soundtrack begins with the sedate, Manson-esque chanting of the cult at the film’s core, and descends into erratic pulses of discordant electronic noise to weave a disturbing sonic tapestry. I listened to the full album two times in a row as I waited out the clock for my work-from-home Friday to give way to the weekend…it’s that good.
(Note: I intended to make mention of a short story I started perhaps a week ago, but while I know the ending, I have already lost the momentum to stick with it. When I was younger, writing prose came so easily to me; now I just see it as a ball of string unraveling in strange and unfocused directions, maybe because my brain has turned to mush – too much beer; too much time on creativity-killing social media; too much life in general. I don’t have this issue of slack motivation and overall despair when I work on script – quite the contrary: the more rigid, detail-limited format allows me the opportunity to put scenes, characters, and dialog into sharper focus. So what I’m saying is: the short story I started – and will probably never finish – may transform itself into a completed short script at some point in the future. Stay tuned!)
Jonny Numb 
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