It's strange watching a film on the big screen that was obviously intended to be watched on the small one. "Late Night With the Devil," written and directed by the Cairnes brothers, is a found footage feature, designed to look like a lost episode of an old '70s late night talk show, "Night Owls with Jack Delroy." The show and its guests are fictional, but loosely based on real figures from the era. The budget was clearly low, but the filmmakers succeeded in capturing the feeling of watching a piece of live television from the '70s, back when late night was a little weirder, the public was more easily fooled, and you could imagine a guy might really kill to be the next Johnny Carson.
The footage is preceded by a brief introductory biography of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), who at the time of the taping has suffered the recent loss of his lovely wife Madeline (Georgina Haig) to cancer. "Night Owls" is in its sixth season and declining in ratings, but Delroy is hopeful that his Halloween show and its very special guests will be able to turn things around. These guests include the psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a skeptic named Carmichael (Ian Bliss) who debunks claims of supernatural powers, and a parapsychologist, Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), with her teenage patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli). Lilly is the only survivor of a demon-worshiping cult that committed mass suicide, and Dr. Ross-Mitchell claims that she is possessed by the demon Abraxas. The footage from the show is intercut with behind the scenes material that reveal what's taking place during the commercial breaks.
And it was the first behind the scenes segment where I knew the movie wasn't going to work for me as intended. Up until that point the movie had kept up the found footage gimmick pretty well, but there's no attempt to explain why someone was filming the behind the scenes interactions, and why the results didn't look like footage from the '70s. There's more format-breaking near the end of the movie, which took me out of the "Late Night" reality in a way that I thought was completely unnecessary. The "Night Owls" episode itself is put together so well, I'm curious to see if a cut of the film that removes everything else might work better. Because despite my nitpicking about the structure, there's plenty here to like.
The whole movie is one big buildup to a grand finale, and leans heavily on the performers. This is one of David Dastmachian's first significant lead roles, and he's great. He has the talk show patter down, and keeps the audience's sympathies despite continuously making bad calls all night. A lot of the work of generating tension is done by Rhys Auteri, who plays Jack Delroy's schlubby sidekick Gus, the most visibly nervous person onscreen throughout the show. I think the MVP, however, may be Ian Bliss as the skeptic Carmichael, loosely based on magician/skeptic James Randi. Carmichael's a little too mean as he goes about debunking the other guests, and is nicely set up as a secondary antagonist. Then there's Ingrid Torelli as Lilly, who's a sweet kid excited to be on television one minute, and something far more sinister the next. Her habit of staring into the cameras might be the most unnerving thing in the picture.
There's been a little controversy around the filmmakers' use of generative AI for some of the artwork in the film, specifically interstitials and intro graphics. I doubt most people would notice, but the corner cutting points to how low budget "Late Night With the Devil" is. You can tell the vast majority of the effects money was used up in two big scenes, and the rest are barely scraping by with a lot of old school trickery and misdirection. It's been a while since I've seen a production with this many of the seams showing, and I wish I could say that it didn't impact my enjoyment of the movie, but it did. I applaud the filmmakers for their ambitiousness, but some of the ideas flat out don't work. Enough of them did that I still found "Late Night With the Devil" a fun watch, but I can't help wishing that more experienced hands were involved.
If you're an aficionado of horror films, however, there are far worse viewing choices. "Late Night With the Devil" is novel, it's nostalgic, and it's perfect Halloween viewing. I consider it entirely my own fault that I'm too nitpicky to enjoy its kitschy charms as much as I'd hoped.
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