Late Night With The Devil

The AI Is
In The Detail

Late Night With The Devil
Directed by Cameron and Colin Cairnes
Australia/United Arab Emirates
2023 Shudder
UK Cinema Print

Warning: Some slight spoilers waiting to possess you.

Well this is pretty good but, before I get into the review proper, I want to address an issue with Late Night With The Devil which has caused a bit of a furore on Twitter the past week or so. The film has TV chanel card style intertitles throughout to signal ‘commercial breaks’ and other things which were designed by AI. Now, they don’t last very long and they’re kind of incidental so... I doubt they’ll spoil the enjoyment of the film for anyone who doesn’t know how that artwork originated. However, I can completely understand why people want to boycott this movie. It’s still taken away a job from at least one human and, frankly, the creative realm (and the political realm, for that matter) is not where AI should be used, no matter how responsibly. Stick to using it as a tool to help with medical breakthroughs etc... don’t let it anywhere near art, would be my take on this. I don’t care whether it fools you or not. I don’t care whether it’s soulless or not (it is). It’s basically wrong... stop it already.

Right, having said that, this is a really great film. Set in 1977, it focuses on an unctuous late night TV show host, Jack Delroy, brilliantly played with gusto by David Dastmalchian (who was also brilliant as Polka Dot Man in The Suicide Squad... reviewed here). In a last ditch ‘save the show’ ratings bid, he asks various guest onto a special Halloween edition of the show dealing with the occult.

The film, we are told, during an extended introduction sequence narrated by the voice of the great Michael Ironside, is the original master tape of the show (along with the behind the scenes sections during the various commercial interruptions). The way this format is presented on the picture is the actual TV broadcast sections are in colour in a 4:3 aspect ratio and the ‘cameras rolling behind the scenes while the commercials play’ are in widescreen black and white. Which is nice visual shorthand and works really well.

Now, if you’re thinking this sounds like a modern day equivalent of the brilliant 1992 British TV broadcast Ghostwatch (reviewed here) then, yeah, you’d be dead right (even though the writers haven’t mentioned it in anything I’ve read about it but, honestly, I can’t believe that wasn’t the majority of the inspiration here). And, without having the trick of appearing as an actual live broadcast on TV to spark the nationwide panic which I remember from when people just happened to tune into it at the time, then it seems, on the surface, like this is kind of a bad idea of a movie attempt. But... you’d be wrong. This movie is actually quite special and I am definitely going to pick up the Blu Ray (if it’s around by Halloween) to show my folks later in the year (that’s the plan, anyway).

Okay, so among the guests on this edition are psychic Christou (played wonderfully by Fayssal Bazzi), the conjurer turned professional debunker (played by Ian Bliss), plus young satanic cult survivor Lily D’Abo (played absolutely brilliantly by Ingrid Torelli, giving a really unsettling performance of a character who knows exactly which camera is on her at any given moment) and her psychiatrist/therapist/guardian Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (played by Laura Gordon). Things go disturbingly wrong for Christou the psychic early on in the show and then the debunker sets himself up as, pretty much the ‘human’ villain of the piece. Then we have the doctor, who is pressured into allowing Lily to ‘let out’ the demonic spirit, Mr. Wriggles, to the audience briefly. And then things go very wrong indeed.

And that’s both the blessing and the curse of this particular film. It’s great when  all hell breaks loose in the TV studio (and presumably into the TV audiences homes... just as it did in Ghostwatch) with the film makers really going for it with the various gore effects and disturbing images. It’s great but... there’s a point where it should have stopped (at the first ‘technical problems’ card) because the impact of the sequence when ‘Mr. Wriggles’ returns to the studio, is absolutely brilliant and ‘good horror’. The creature manifested reminded me a lot of one of the original theatrical posters which were put out for Dario Argento’s early 1970’s giallo Four Flies On Grey Velvet (reviewed here) which was also, presumably, the ‘inspiration’ for the theatrical poster for Berberian Sound Studio (reviewed here) but neither of those films, to my memory, had any such manifestation of a certain ‘splitting headache’ person on screen and, frankly, the way they picture what Lily becomes the second time she is channelling her possessor is... pretty incredible.

Now, I think the film goes on too long because, after this scene which was the perfect ending, there is another extended sequence of fragments of horror which, I think, just detracted too much from the power of what preceded it. But, it’s still pretty good and I’m happy to buy into certain moments on it, even though the way Jack Delroy ends up on stage is pretty obviously telegraphed.

And that’s all there is to it other than to say, I suspect one of the musical compositions by one or other of the co-composers, Roscoe James Irwin or Glenn Richards, sounds suspiciously like it was inspired by the Scorpio killer theme from the original Dirty Harry (review coming soon). It’s good stuff though and would love it if a CD release was produced. And there are a lot of other visual and script nods to things like The Exorcist too so, I really have no problem with the legacy of the scoring, either.

And that’s all I have to say about Late Night With The Devil, I think. An almost perfect entry that, just about, makes its way into the subgenre of horror known as ‘found footage’. I really loved it and can’t wait to show other people the movie at some point. Cracking stuff.