New & now: Late Night With the Devil
David Dastmalchian levels up from weird little guy to genuine movie star, & I am here for it.
My grandmother loved Johnny Carson. Like how Bruce Springsteen is referred to as just “Bruce” in my household, so too was Johnny Carson just “Johnny” in hers. “Johnny started late tonight.” “Did you see Johnny last night? Neil Diamond was on.” If she had known that someday there would be channels devoted entirely to running old episodes of The Tonight Show, she’d still be alive today at age 98, and the world would be a better place.
I don’t think the youths really know about the stranglehold Johnny Carson had on late night television between 1970 and 1990. That’s understandable: current late night television (for anyone who even bothers with it anymore) is a vast landscape of political humor, sketch comedy, celebrity interviews, and whatever the hell it was James Corden was doing for a while there. But Johnny Carson, he did it all, and without the “please love me” desperation of Corden or Jimmy Fallon. Many tried to claim his title of King of Late Night, the closest to get there was David Letterman, who still fell short.
One can imagine that his competitors would have tried a lot of wild stunts to knock Carson out of his throne, and so too does Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) in Late Night With the Devil. Jack’s talk show, Night Owls, is actually pretty successful, but it always comes a distant second in the ratings. Not even a special episode devoted to Jack’s dying wife was enough to gain him some ground, and both Jack, and more importantly the head of his network, are starting to worry.
But sweeps week of 1977 coincides with Halloween, and Jack’s got a heck of a show planned. His guests include self-proclaimed psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), and insufferably smug magician-turned-professional skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), who’s eager to pounce on Christou like a cat on a mouse. The real showstopper, however, is psychiatrist/paranormal researcher June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), and her star patient, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the sole survivor of a fire that killed the members of a Satanic cult.
Capitalizing on America’s post-Manson Family and The Exorcist fascination with the occult, Jack is eager to present Dr. June and Lilly, whom Dr. June claims is possessed by a demon, to his unsuspecting audience. Even after an unsettling experience during Christou’s performance, Jack presses forward with the show, as it looks like audiences across the country are tuning in to see what happens next, and, more importantly, pushing up his ratings.
That’s essentially the plot of Late Night With the Devil, which is ostensibly a found footage film, but not in a distracting shaky-cam kind of way. If it suffers anywhere, it’s that it shows its hand too soon: unless you miss the first five minutes you can probably guess what the twist is. But hey, you know what, I knew the twist when I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time (thanks for spoiling that, Entertainment Weekly) and it didn’t diminish its impact. So much happens in the last twenty minutes of Late Night that even figuring out in advance why any of it is happening ends up being irrelevant.
Verging on a mockumentary at times, it perfectly captures the genial corniness of old talk shows, right down to the mildly sexist comedy bits and pie-in-the-face gags. It also gets the drab brown 70s vibe so well that you can almost smell the unfiltered cigarettes. Despite not a lot happening for the first half other than the recreation of a talk show, it breezes right by, and its abrupt turn into gore and chaos almost catches you off-guard. It’s not a terribly scary movie, but it is shitloads of fun.
After a career of mostly playing weird little guys in various supporting roles, it’s nice to see David Dastmalchian play the lead character for once. His hooded eyes always make him look like he has a secret you absolutely don’t want him to share with you. Here it’s to particularly good effect, because he’s also undeniably charming and likable. You kinda want Jack Delroy to beat Johnny Carson in the ratings, even if just for one night. He’s not a bad guy, just too ambitious for his own good, and how many of us have left ambition go to our heads, with disastrous results? If he had had more devoted fans like my grandmother, maybe none of this would have had to happen.
"His hooded eyes always make him look like he has a secret you absolutely don’t want him to share with you."
That's the perfect way to describe him