Rookie officer Jessica Loren (Juliana Harkavy)is assigned to work the last shift at a police station before it is due to close. This seemingly routine task soon turns into a nightmare when the 'lone' officer starts noticing paranormal activity within the police station.
Part of the beauty with the Last Shift lies with its simplicity - it essentially takes place in one location and attempts to use its isolated setting to try and draw fear from the audience. I suppose it succeeds in this respect to a certain degree, but there are a whole host of problems with this film....
The isolated setting does serve the film well in the early stages in that there's a sense of claustrophobia to proceedings and it is possible to feel some fear for our protagonist, but sadly director Anthony DiBlasi doesn't seem to know how to develop the story in a manner that is either scary or interesting (many of the scenes are repetitive and start to become tiresome). Whist the film has a solid protagonist it does lack a decent antagonist (meaning that it never really felt that scary to me). In fact it is the laziness inherent in this film that makes it so dull (as well as featuring scene after scene that makes the whole film feel as though it's on some kind of tedious loop at times, the film also has other unimaginative sequences such as a pile of chairs being stacked on top of one another - how many times have we seen this before???). Even when the antagonists are introduced, DiBlasi mostly reduces them to being rather thinly drawn caricatures who spend most of their time pouncing at the screen in rather cheap 'cinematic' fashion - a better developed backstory on the Paymon family might have made the film slightly more interesting.
Whilst DiBlasi's narrative is dull and repetitive I got the feeling that he was trying to compensate for this in other areas; he really went to town in the makeup that he used on the Paymon family (some of it is actually quite good), but again it felt like he was content in making them 'look' scary rather than actually making them scary (there is a difference).
Julian Harkavy is the main bright spot in this tedious mess and she is very convincing in her respect role. She gives an incredibly intense performance when required, she's a tough cookie who can handle herself, but has a certain vulnerability about her which helps to keep the picture fairly grounded.
DiBlasi seems to lose control towards the end where things start to get silly and the film is chocked full of WTF moments towards the end. With its isolated setting this could have been good, but it's clichéd, repetitive, tedious, and long sections of it are rather boring.
Part of the beauty with the Last Shift lies with its simplicity - it essentially takes place in one location and attempts to use its isolated setting to try and draw fear from the audience. I suppose it succeeds in this respect to a certain degree, but there are a whole host of problems with this film....
The isolated setting does serve the film well in the early stages in that there's a sense of claustrophobia to proceedings and it is possible to feel some fear for our protagonist, but sadly director Anthony DiBlasi doesn't seem to know how to develop the story in a manner that is either scary or interesting (many of the scenes are repetitive and start to become tiresome). Whist the film has a solid protagonist it does lack a decent antagonist (meaning that it never really felt that scary to me). In fact it is the laziness inherent in this film that makes it so dull (as well as featuring scene after scene that makes the whole film feel as though it's on some kind of tedious loop at times, the film also has other unimaginative sequences such as a pile of chairs being stacked on top of one another - how many times have we seen this before???). Even when the antagonists are introduced, DiBlasi mostly reduces them to being rather thinly drawn caricatures who spend most of their time pouncing at the screen in rather cheap 'cinematic' fashion - a better developed backstory on the Paymon family might have made the film slightly more interesting.
Whilst DiBlasi's narrative is dull and repetitive I got the feeling that he was trying to compensate for this in other areas; he really went to town in the makeup that he used on the Paymon family (some of it is actually quite good), but again it felt like he was content in making them 'look' scary rather than actually making them scary (there is a difference).
Julian Harkavy is the main bright spot in this tedious mess and she is very convincing in her respect role. She gives an incredibly intense performance when required, she's a tough cookie who can handle herself, but has a certain vulnerability about her which helps to keep the picture fairly grounded.
DiBlasi seems to lose control towards the end where things start to get silly and the film is chocked full of WTF moments towards the end. With its isolated setting this could have been good, but it's clichéd, repetitive, tedious, and long sections of it are rather boring.