We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody checks out new horror.
LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023)
Over the last few years, David Dastmalchian has been emerging as one of my favorite actors working today (and yes, it helps that he has shared a couple of the articles I have written about his projects for JoBlo.com on his social media accounts), so when it was announced that he would have the lead role in a horror movie called Late Night with the Devil, I was hyped. Especially when it was said that the story would take place in 1977, since I like when stories have a retro setting.
Written and directed by the sibling duo of Colin and Cameron Cairnes, Late Night with the Devil has Dastmalchian taking on the role of late night talk show host Jack Delroy, whose show Night Owls is in competition with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson – and, of course, always falls a bit short of Carson in the ratings. Jack is rumored to have participated in potentially occult gatherings in the Redwood forest in an effort to boost his ratings, but on Halloween of 1977 his attempt to draw in viewers is a spooky special where he’ll be taking to the medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), magician-turned-skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), and Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli, giving a terrifically odd performance), the survivor of a cult’s mass suicide, who’s accompanied by parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon). Not surprising to any horror fan is the fact that Lilly has emerged from her cult ordeal with a seriously nasty spirit attached to her, and that spirit proceeds to wreak havoc in the Night Owls studio as the episode plays out. Jack recently lost his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) to cancer, so it’s also no surprise that the evil spirit uses that loss to torment him.
The Cairnes took an interesting approach to bringing this story to the screen, as the segments of Night Owls are presented as they would look if they were actually footage from a talk show filmed in 1977. Full frame, color. Then when the live broadcast goes to commercial break, we get to take a look behind-the-scenes with widescreen, black & white footage. The actors do great work in their roles, with Dastmalchian making Jack an interesting, troubled figure and Torelli having some very creepy moments as Lilly. There are also some really cool bursts of special effects and gross-out visuals... which were nice to see, but at the same time, I wasn’t quite sure about the inclusion of those moments.
While I enjoyed Late Night with the Devil overall, I became less impressed with it the further it went with the horror, and the final sequence almost lost me simply because I’m not into weird freak-out sequences like that. It’s not really a strike against the movie, it’s just not for me. So this one wasn’t really what I hoped it would be, but it was a decent horror flick and it was cool to see Dastmalchian in the lead.
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