Late Night with the Devil (2024)

Late Night with the Devil demonstrates how much can be achieved with a quality script and exceptional acting.
First off the performance by David Dastmalchian is simply excellent, in every sense. He beautifully and convincingly pulls off a Johnny Carson style, impression of a late night 70's interviewer. The man is wholly believable and to be honest, its his performance that drew me in and kept me watching till the end.
The story is well rendered too. Its not exceptional but there's a decent amount of originality and a sense of ambiguity, especially surrounding the main character to create intrigue and interest. Has the interviewer already made a shadowy pact with the devil? What price will he pay? Tune in, to see.
On the down side there are obvious budgetary constraints in play. That said, but there is so much quality on offer here in terms of performances from the cast and a solid story, its really not overly noticeable.
In summary, a flick defined by exceptional performances and a quality, Faustian style, back story. A must watch if you like "quality" horror.

With his days of chasing Johnny Carson in the television ratings long gone, the now struggling and recently bereaved talk show host "Jack Delroy" (David Dastmalchian) is staring cancellation in the face. Then he and producer "Leo" (Josh Quong Tart) come up with an idea for a riveting Halloween special. The gist of what comes now purports to be an off-air recording of that lost transmission from 1977 - and it's quite literally hair raising. His first guest is a medium, his second an out-and-out sceptic and his third - well they have quite an unique claim to fame - and it's this last quarter of the film that comes "alive". Sadly, the rest of this feature is rather hampered by the constant (virtual) advertising breaks that completely suck the pace out of the thing. They are designed to, in monochrome, fill in a little of the back-stage machinations as the programme goes to air but for me, they just interrupted - far too frequently - the culmination of the truth or fake storyline. Dastmalchian does an half decent job here, but the plaudits really belong to Ian Bliss and his sarcastic "Carmichael Haig" character. He's the poacher-cum-gamekeeper cynic who has a ridiculing put down for just about everything that emanates from the other characters. Projectile vomiting or chair levitation - he has an plausible explanation. That's maybe part of the film's problem in general. Though set in the 1970s when these kind of visual effects were less prevalent, the whole thing just comes across as a perfectly plausible ratings-gathering gimmick. Whilst that's not necessarily a bad thing, it does rather rob the film of any pretence of horror or mystery. In fact, by the conclusion it seemed more designed to send up the whole principle of half-baked, late-night American television hosted by vain, ambitious but largely talentless men in suits. It's short and sweet, and doesn't hang around - but I just didn't find it particularly shocking or innovative. Wait til it's on the television, I'd say.