Late Night With the Devil (2024)
Talk show host Jack Delroy has tried to do everything right in the world of showbiz. He’s risen through the ranks of stardom. He’s a member of a secret gentleman’s club in California called The Grove, which, yes, is based on The Bohemian Grove. While the press (and America’s women) love him, Jack’s show, Night Owls is always coming in second place to The Tonight Show, and since the death of his wife from lung cancer, Jack’s ratings keep plummeting.
Faced with the prospect of his show getting cancelled, Jack tries something desperate: He’ll bring in a psychic, a skeptic, the author of a book called Conversations With the Devil and Lilly, the author’s demon-possessed ward, topping everything off with a performance by a singer appropriately named Miss Cleo. It’ll all happen live on Halloween night.
This might seem like the setup for a really bad joke, but Jack’s hoping for ratings gold. It is Sweeps Week, after all.
However, as the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Night Owls starts out very normally, with the usual patter between Jack and his emcee, Gus, plus some banter with the audience, but the lighthearted moments don’t last. Before the night is over, Jack, his guest stars and his audience are thrust into a hellish nightmare that makes them question what is real and what isn’t. Some may not walk out alive…or will they?
Even we, the movie audience, can’t be sure of what we’re seeing or not seeing. Our eyes may play tricks on us, and it’s fun as all get-out. Disturbing, clever fun.
Late Night With the Devil, which centers around a fictional seventies talk show, only slightly recalls The Blair Witch Project in that it’s presented as found footage. Unlike Blair Witch, Late Night never claims to be real, although it mostly nails the look and feel of talk shows of almost fifty years ago. It’s as if the filmmakers pulled a Cosmo Kramer and swiped Merv Griffin’s old set. David Dastmalchian plays Jack as a low-key mix of Geraldo, Phil Donahue and Dick Cavett. I don’t know about anyone else, but this seventies baby got all kinds of nostalgia feels.
As a horror movie, Late Night is not super-scary, as any horror is tempered with twists of satire. I really have to give Colin and Cameron Cairnes, who wrote and directed the film, mad props for not being trigger-happy with the jumpscares and other all-too-typical horror cliches. Late Night With the Devil instead relies on a tight story, carefully placed baiting and switching and characters that are just fleshed-out enough so that we care about what happens to them. From start to finish the film is hugely absorbing and flies by.
The only thing that doesn’t seem quite believable is how pristine the so-called “found footage” is, because obviously HD didn’t exist in the seventies. Lilly’s tights, for instance, would have looked smooth instead of textured, and any lines on the actors’ faces would have been obscured. If anything is going to break a viewer’s immersion, particularly if they were born in the seventies or before, it’s going to be the worry wrinkle on Jack’s forehead when stuff starts hitting the fan, even if it works for the film itself.
Late Night With the Devil is definitely not for everyone. I didn’t think it was going to be for me, either, but it’s a pleasantly chilling and memorable film.
Late Night With the Devil is currently in theaters. Rated R.
My grade: A+
Principal Cast: David Dastmalchian, Laura Golden, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torelli, Rhys Auteri, Georgina Haig, Josh Quong Tart, Steve Mouzakis, Paula Arundell, Tamala Shelton, Gaby Seow, Elise Jansen, John O’May, Clare Chihambakwe, Amelie Mendoza
Written and directed by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes