Heeeee’res Satan!

Giving chase seems to be the prevailing theme of Late Night with the Devil. No matter how hard Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) chases the ratings of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, he can never get a firm grasp on the throne of success. And honestly, that’s what the whole move felt like: close but no cigar.

I was immediately hooked when the trailers started dropping for Late Night with the Devil. Show me anything with a grimy texture, a fuck you attitude, and doing anything bold, and I’m in headfirst. I love Blaxploitation films, grindhouse, westerns, and old-school Hammer horror flicks, so I was ready to fall in love as soon as I saw that BetaMax color vibe and smokey radio announcer voice.

Set in 1977, the premise of Late Night with the Devil is that Delroy and his producers are on the ropes; they need a win to get back into the ratings game. They land on a live Halloween event to challenge all comers with the episode that will make them famous – or infamous. They explain this all in the first few minutes, set to a rad Pentagram song, but soon after, we start to see the screws come loose off the plot tank. (Side note: but an egregious amount of production companies got this thing across the finish line. We thought it was a part of the movie’s camp, to be honest.)

The directors shot the film so that the on-air moments use that grainy textured look, complete with the 1970s-style cutaways I love, but once the show goes to break, everything goes to a regular film look, just in black and white to illustrate seriousness, apparently.

The storyline explains that the show needs a win during Sweeps Week, which, if you’re not of a certain age, you’ll have no idea what the hell this means. Before streaming and the glut of content that we now endure, networks would air their best episodes during said week, and however, the ratings performed showed how the networks could charge for airtime during these shows. Jack and his producer Leo (Josh Quong Tart) say, “Yo, let’s try to create the darkest show, ever.” So, they decide to go full Exorcist.

At the film’s beginning, a psychic known as Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) does a pretty solid acting job on the surface. It’s clear he’s a total bullshit artist, but the Devil is for real in the building and comes to him, which is believable and pretty cool. As Christou does his thing, there’s Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), dedicated to debunking all forms of The Unknown. Carmichael never takes his foot off the gas, with his constant eyebrow-raising at everything happening within the studio. I loved the corny interplay dialogue between Delroy and his crew, which is the same form and function as today.

Bestselling parapsychologist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) interviews Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the sole survivor of the whole Anton Lavey meets David Koresh thing, which involves weird knives and an FBI standoff. The good doctor talks to the Devil through Lilly, and Carmichael is not impressed. That’s the basic plot.

But from there, everything goes just milquetoast. The idea of Late Night with the Devil is brilliant, but the execution never gets moving. Australian filmmakers Colin and Cameron Cairnes made this movie with love, and no one should think otherwise. However, the idea of the “found footage” that this is an infamous film that we need to see never becomes self-actualized. If anything, one of the hard sells is that pretty much anything notorious is on YouTube, but that’s a nitpick.

The Carmichael scenes are interesting, but as soon as he goes off against the doctor, the plot gets muddy with allusions to Bohemian Grove, that Delroy made a deal with the Devil. But they never explain how or why. While the film’s ending goes off the rails in terms of plot and storyline, it’s clear the filmmakers did the best with what they could with a Shudder budget because the effects are BAD. Like, you can see the lines of the bald cap bad. None of the dramatic scenes that make a horror flick a horror flick were believable. With a bigger budget, they could likely have corrected that problem, so mulligan on that one. The end of the movie, though, still trying to figure out what happened there.

It’s clear these guys think differently, and the world needs more original cinematic voices, so if this is only the beginning, that’s important to note. People are excited to see this movie and, in this ecosystem, again, another win for creativity. Coming out of the theater, we said fun, not scary. And that’s an acceptable way to think. Late Night with the Devil is fun, so don’t go into it expecting a life-changing film.