Late Night with the Devil
Can “Late Night with the Devil” live up to its name? I don’t know. This film is set in 1977 and describes a fourth television network that never existed (at that time, there were three). According to the story, a competitor springs up against Johnny Carson’s late night talk show in the ’70s Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a local Chicago host who gets promoted nationally. All this and more is laid out in a five-minute prologue that contains one essential biographical detail I’ll omit here because it’s a spoiler, suffice to say that Jack has been on the air for six seasons without beating Carson’s ratings though he did once come close.
Then comes sweeps week, a quarterly event where AC Nielsen determines what networks can charge for airtime and the networks try to goose the numbers by airing their biggest, splashiest, most outrageous stuff. Jack (Damon Herriman) and his oily producer Leo (Josh Quong Tart), who could be the brother of Sean Penn’s coke fiend lawyer in “Carlito’s Way,” have been doing supernaturally themed Halloween broadcasts with a costume contest for years. This year they decide to invite a package of thematically linked guests. One is Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic who does a mentalist routine, guessing factoids about the audience in what seems like a pretty scammy way; another is Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), an Amazing Randi “debunker” type who quickly explains how Christou might have fooled the audience into thinking he had paranormal abilities. Then comes the evening’s centerpiece: bestselling parapsychologist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) interviews Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the only survivor of a satanic cult’s mass suicide during a standoff with police.
It gets wilder from there, folks. Weirder. Grosser. There is no doubt that writer-director brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes and their talented crew put their backs into this thing especially once it turns into an exploding viscera factory.
But it also keeps getting in its own way and tripping over itself. The from the jump insistence that it’s a “found footage” movie built around a buried broadcast instantly creates unrealistic expectations for everything that follows; we’re told at least twice that this material is being presented decades after it aired on live TV on Nov. 2, 1977 as part of Channel 31 public access station WNUF’s annual Halloween special, which was interrupted by supernatural events at a haunted farmhouse somewhere in southern Pennsylvania (the exact location, a title card tells us, has never been identified, probably because it’s cursed).
This is a movie that pretty much does whatever it wants whenever it wants to, and doesn’t feel too much pressure to stay beholden to the visual conventions of circa-1977 American late night talk shows that can be researched and emulated pretty easily thanks to YouTube. (To be fair, though, I’ve seen very few “found footage” movies that actually feel like footage that was found. Almost all of them cheat so often that you have to wonder why anyone wants to make them in the first place.)
The prologue also strikes me as a mistake because it frames the rest of the movie as a thing that you have to get through in order to arrive at the ending you already know is coming based on the prologue, whereas simply presenting The WNUF Halloween Special itself without explanation or a framing device as an artifact would have thrown audiences into the deep end of the pool and created a sense of mystery throughout, while all of this important plot stuff was being communicated organically, within the context of the broadcast (people talk to Jack on the air about what’s happened in these years leading up to this disaster, it is very well done; it sounds like what people on a TV show would actually say to somebody in his situation).
There are also some “backstage” moments, seemingly shot on the fly by network cameramen who are onstage at all times for some reason (or two separate reasons?), which invite such questions as. Why did not one but two curious cameramen with convenient access not restricted by rules/laws decide now and here was when they’d finally go documentary rogue? And how did those bits end up being edited together with footage originally intended for broadcast? Did somebody cut everything together later in post-production? In which style? Was there one master tape? Was it all cut together in the style of a dramatic feature film? If so, why does the master tape read “CURSED OBJECT/DO NOT OPEN”?
The found footage stylistic tics and other signifiers of “realism” raise questions beyond just the usual ones about how so many people died while carrying around cameras. This was a live broadcast, right? (We see the van leaving with Jack and Leo inside; we hear them banter via walkie talkies.) So why did nobody try to call or radio for help during that 20-minute span when half the studio audience was puking blood or getting choked by spectral hands or being carried off by giant spiders? And why did anybody stick around after Christou’s first trick, which involved him pulling what looked like sentient black goo out of his nose? Or after one of the guests projectile-vomited what looked like sentient black goo from the “Venom” movies?
At least viewers at home could avoid seeing whatever horrors were unfolding onstage at WNUF. They could just turn off their TV sets and crawl into bed. But nobody watching this movie can do that.
Yeah, I fall into what Hitchcock called “The Plausibles,” but even he knew that a movie has to really cook to make you turn off your brain, and this one never gets above a simmer.
Dastmalchian is very good as Jack, particularly in moments of vulnerability and self-delusion, but I don’t quite see the star making performance here that some of my colleagues do. That’s mainly because I didn’t find him plausible as a guy who rose to national prominence on the late night talk show circuit by being hilarious. He reads monologue jokes and desk banter that are supposed to be funny, and we hear the audience roaring, but that’s the movie telling you he’s funny, not him actually being funny; the audience laughed at Robert DeNiro’s jokes in “Joker,” too, and for all his chameleonic acting genius, De Niro was about as funny as a potato in that role. Which is another way of saying that it works as drama but doesn’t work in terms of selling me on the core idea that somebody bought this guy as a young Turk who could unseat Johnny Carson.
But still: The originality of the idea! The vibe! Whether or not you think it pulls it all off in total-oy vey, what I wouldn’t give for a large-format coffee-table book of freeze frames from this movie. It’s so richly imagined, and everyone looks like they had such fun immersing themselves in this strange and often scary world. (It doesn’t look much like 1977 especially with that unfortunate use of AI-generated interstitial and background art; sorry guys, but pretty much everything about those screams “tech bro fads of the 21st century.” (You couldn’t have hired one of your starving graphic artist friends for the cost of a few vintage wide lapeled shirts?) But it definitely says “the ’70s,” in a general way the lighting by cinematographer Matthew Temple (though some of the camera moves are distractingly post-“Goodfellas” Scorsese) the “Sunday afternoon at T.G.I. Friday’s” clothes on the audience members (by costumer Steph Hooke) that typeface used for the show’s credits.
And there is a grubby, acquisitive aura that hangs over the whole thing; something about sweaty people with shaggy hair chain smoking on talk shows, reporters going “undercover” in brothels and shooting galleries on local newscasts, contestants throwing gross innuendos at each other on game shows I remember that from my own ’70s childhood, sitting on my parents’ living room rug watching TV. You can imagine Satan looking at TV in the ’70s and calling his agent.
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