Main cast: David Dastmalchian (Jack Delroy), Laura Gordon (June Ross-Mitchell), Ian Bliss (Carmichael Haig), Fayssal Bazzi (Christou), Ingrid Torelli (Lilly D’Abo), Rhys Auteri (Gus McConnell), Georgina Haig (Madeleine Piper), and Josh Quong Tart (Leo Fiske)
Directors: Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes
Late Night With the Devil is about the infamous legend of Jack Delroy.
He was a talk show host, one half of the most beloved married sweethearts in town, and had everything seemed laid out for him to be a bona fide star. Even his ties to the Grove, a so-called men-only enclave that is said to be actually some shady cult, barely left a dent in his reputation.
The only problem here is that Night Owls with Jack Delroy kept losing to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the ratings war. After the death of his wife Madeleine, Jack and his producer Leo Fiske retooled the show into a more trashy variety show in a desperate bid to regain footing in the ratings war, but the viewer number kept plummeting down and down until there were rumors that the show would be cancelled.
Then, on Halloween night in 1977, they planned an ultimate live broadcast of an episode that would become the talk of the town, or so they hoped. Well, it went off to become just that, but not in a way these people would hope…
Presented in a semi-serious documentary-style format that pokes fun at the industry as much as it tells a story of occult gone wild, this movie is supposed to be a compilation of previously unreleased footage of that infamous episode.
The whole thing starts out predictably: Jack has some woo-woo guests lined up. There are the psychic Christou, the parapsychology expert June Ross-Mitchell, and the skeptic Carmichael Haig to provide, er, some counterbalance to the woo-woo guests. Also present is Lilly D’Abo, brought onto the show by June, who claims that Lilly is the sole survivor of a suicide cult, led by her father, whose members went out in a most predictable way as part of a ritual to the demon Abraxas. The running gimmick here is that Carmichael will offer a reward to any of the guest that convinces him that their woo-woo is real, and he will be a complete ass to them throughout the process.
Naturally, Jack just has to egg Lilly to summon a demon, and the result is certainly one to remember!
A part of me will always wish that I have not been bombarded with the hype about this show. “Scariest thing ever! Most terrifying movie ever!” Oh please. All that hype causes me to feel rather underwhelmed when I finally watch this thing and realize that it’s “just” solid. After all, they made me believe that this is super good…
The cast members elevate this show. David Dastmalchian is excellent as the genial and goofy-looking nice guy that hides a cold and fame-hungry fellow underneath that façade, while Ian Bliss really steals the show as the obnoxious asshole clearly patterned after the late James Randi, right down to Mr Randi’s infamous quote that he might be a charlatan but hey, he was an honest one. The cast members have chemistry and they all are pretty good in their roles, creating a slow burn of an atmospheric creepy movie.
The movie also has plenty of fun stuff to please fans of the occult, including a pretty good representation of Abraxas, nods to Mr Randi and other well-known personas in that field, and other entertaining stuff that shows me that the Cairnes, who also did the screenplay, know their stuff. The set pieces also create a good representation of the 1970s vibes.
While there are a few genuinely creepy and unnerving scenes here, however, the climactic moment is plain goofy CGI that has me laughing out loud—a reaction that I am sure is not the intention of the folks behind this show! I don’t understand why these people could come up with some solid frightening scenes on one hand and then shove some really bad CGI that will be more at home in something more of a cartoon. Did they run out of money toward the end of the film production or something?
The ending also does that always annoying “Ooh, maybe this is a delusion… or maybe it’s a trick of the demon… and maybe the last 30 minutes never happened, hee-hee!” twist upon a twist gimmick that never fails to come off as the brain fart of folks that are trying way too hard to be clever.
All in all, this is a movie that starts out very good, only to drop the ball toward the end by trying too hard to be some Blumhouse-esque oeuvre that passes off shallow gimmicks as deep stuff, which in turn appeals to fans that confuse deliberate opaqueness for inventive storytelling. Hence, I had fun for the most part, only to end up being deeply disappointed by the last 30 or so minutes.
Oh well. This one is a very solid three-oogie movie for me. I’d give it another oogie if it didn’t morph into Blumhouse’s live action grown-up Scooby-Doo show in its tail end.
