Late Night with the Devil

This week is going to be rough. For the past two days I've worked 1:00 AM - 9:00 AM. Tomorrow I will be 4:00 AM - 12:30 PM. Thursday and Friday I will be 11:00 PM - 8:00 AM. I can't say I'm thrilled with that lineup, but such is life. I just need to survive until Friday! So yeah, let's talk about...

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

This is the movie I have been most excited to watch ever since it came out. I tried finding a stream of it earlier in the month to no avail. Then I decided I would hold off and watch it on Halloween. But then my free subscription of Shudder was ending so I decided to watch it early. I like ending my year with a bang, so I'm glad I didn't save this one for last.

This is a found-footage movie, but that shouldn't scare you off because the footage is from a 1970s talk show and not a herky-jerky video camera. The whole thing looks exactly like what you'd expect an old talk show broadcast to look like. So, the movie kicks off with a documentary introducing you to Jack Delroy. He's a late-night host desperate to unseat Johnny Carson as the king of late-night TV. We learn a little bit about his backstory, his tragedy and his affiliation with a secret society of rich people that appears to be weird but harmless. On Halloween, for the start of "Sweeps Week," Jack has an idea that will finally put him ahead of Carson; he brings in the author of the book Conversations with the Devil and the subject, a young girl possessed by a demon on the show. You know where this is going.

The production values are top-notch. I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but I've seen enough from that decade in different forms of media, and it felt like I was watching a 1970s talk show. Jack, played by David Dastmalchian (Schiff from The Dark Knight) is great. You watch him and he feels like a talk show host. It's well-acted around too. The young girl, her guardian, the skeptic, the sleazy producer, the sidekick and the over-the-top guy who says he can communicate with the dead, all of them, are very good. I also enjoyed the story. It's so simple but so cool. It's one of those, "Why didn't anyone ever think of that?" As someone who works in TV, I was intrigued by that alone and doubly intrigued by all the fanfare this movie got. If you check out some of the horror groups I tend to haunt, this movie almost always gets mentioned as the best of the year. So when I watched it, I was looking forward to having my proverbial socks scared off. Sadly, when the credits rolled, I was left wanting.

It has all the ingredients of a good movie, but like Hereditary, I didn't find it scary. That in itself is odd because I'm a sucker for exorcism movies. I'm Catholic, so demon/possession stories always hit me harder than just about any other genre. I'm not sure why this didn't do it for me. I'm not saying it's not scary at all, there are some excellent moments, but it can't seem to sustain those scares or the tension for more than a few minutes because the "show" goes to commercial breaks and, much like the characters in the movie, we're given time to settle down and by the time the action starts back up, we're already back at zero. It's all peaks and valleys with very little incline.

This is a weird one for me because I am having difficulty deciding exactly how I feel about it. There are movies I liked this October but have no desire to ever watch again and, if I ever get cable again, I would probably keep surfing if I came across them it. However, I was kind of meh on this one, but I would absolutely watch it again. That's the problem; it has great moments but they're spaced out due to the limitations of how they're telling the story. I enjoyed how there were multiple signs that this was a bad idea, but Jack's desire to overtake Carson led him past the point of no return. No amount of danger or warnings from his sidekick would stop this train.

While it wasn't that scary, the finale was very cool. When all hell finally breaks loose, it's a fitting conclusion to what this movie has been building to. I love the demon up and deciding it was done playing around and just ripping through several people. When it reveals itself, the visual is stunning, and it takes a few beats to process what you're seeing. But when you see the blood from one actor you realize that shit has gone bad. But, like the other moments, the movie doesn't sustain its momentum because it slows down at the end. I have mixed thoughts on it because I was annoyed and left with a "That's it?" feeling once the screen went to black after the carnage, but the movie comes back and gives you a little backstory to understand how we got to this moment. Then it ends with a decent reveal that ultimately adds some more questions and before ending for good.

It's a fine movie, there's nothing particularly wrong with it, I think I bit too hard on the hype. Maybe it was my expectations, but I was expecting and hoping for something scarier and it just didn't do it for me. It's still a good movie and it's well-acted, but I left feeling a little underwhelmed.