Might be huge spoilers in this trailer but I hadn’t heard of it at all and I love David Dastmalchian.
This looks fantastic (note: this == the 4 seconds of the trailer I watched aht the small bits I’ve read about it).
Saw this last night.
Enjoyable watch, Dastmalchian and the cast give some great performances, but it really ended up disappointing me, as they didn’t stick to the “found footage” idea of the film being a viewing of the master tape of the infamous episode of “Night Owls”. The show is presented in 4:3 and uses some faux TV camera effects to give the idea that you are watching the show, which looks really great, but they do cut-aways during the commercial breaks to a 1977 period inaccurate hand-held B&W camera (that does not look like a 16mm or 8mm handheld) for plot necessary reasons. I think it would have been much more thematically appropriate to use security footage with hot mics picking up action at a distance, because the commercial segments that are “behind the scenes” footage did not feel true to the found footage aesthetic they were going for.
There is some really neat stuff in there, as the concept itself is very solid. An attempt to boost ratings by having a guest who is “possessed” on air, and all of the terrible things you could imagine happen because of that. Very good idea for a film.
The other criticism I would have, is that it does exactly what you expect going in, it is very trope heavy with the dynamic of the overbearing producer pushing ratings over common sense etc.
There are a couple of really neat sequences in the film though, dealing with the Skeptic who is on the program to debunk all of the spooky stuff going on.
In the end, it ended up not being as good as it should have been. Also, final criticism is the use of AI art in the interstitials, they look worse than they could have, if a human had done them (you can find plenty of artists online doing versions of the AI art that look 100% better) Seriously, the AI art takes up about 0.1% of the film run time, but the inclusion alone taints the final product.
1/5 (For using AI art) (If there had been no AI art, 3/5)
I really disliked this, mainly because it was such a clumsy and implausible take on its subject matter. And I don’t mean the demonic possession, which is already clumsy and implausible as is. Instead, I mean late night TV.
The first problem is that it’s as if the filmmakers have never seen late night TV from the 70s. I doubt they’ve ever even seen an episode of The Larry Sanders Show. This felt like someone had played a game of telephone, and this movie was made from some fifth- or sixth-hand account of what television production was like back then. Or any television production, for that matter. Had they never heard of Ghostwatch, which should have been their inspiration? I mean, for chrissake, you could just play Not For Broadcast to get a handle on how all this stuff works and what the sausage factory looks like. But with the sole exception of the production design, nothing in this movie’s setting is convincing.
And this leads me to my second problem: David Dastmalchian is a wonderful actor, and he’s great at playing broken people in the shadows. But a charismatic talk show host supposedly neck-and-neck with Johnny Carson for ratings? I hate to say it about an actor I admire as much as Dastmalchian, but dude, you’re not selling it. That’s going to be an issue when anyone makes a movie about a celebrity: you need that celebrity quality to sell it, and if it were easy to find in everyday or even just skilled actors, celebrities wouldn’t be celebrities.
Right? Such a weird reversal after that ponderous Michael Ironsides intro montage, which winds up to “…and now here’s the never-before-seen master tape from that night!” Except that we’re just watching a conventionally shot 2024 horror movie complete with handheld cameras all up in the actors’ faces. It makes me wonder if that intro was added after-the-fact, when they’d already shot the movie as is, but wanted to add more of a hook or intro upfront. Whatever the case, it doesn’t work as “never before seen footage of a live event”.
One of my absolute favorite takedowns of the inanity of modern TV is Steve Coogan’s latest Alan Partridge joint, This Time with Alan Partridge. It takes place only during the running time of the show-within-the-show, and it is just soooo good at how it presents footage during the off-camera portions of the show while the commercials are running! I really wish the Cairnes brothers who made Late Night with the Devil had done their homework.
I’m afraid I disagree with you here – I didn’t care for any of it – but I did like the actor playing the skeptic. I felt like he was pretty much the only one playing an actual character from the 70s!
I Probably would have gone to see this but it disappeared from local theaters so fast that I missed it.
I got a little bit past the big exposition dump before bailing. The trailers made this seem like something closer to Ghostwatch, but I couldn’t get into this at all.
This was really disappointing. I love the premise that was marketed to everyone - a possession/exorcism story supposedly happening live on a late-night talk show in the 70’s, but as @tomchick wrote, this really isn’t that at all. The movie pretty quickly abandons that conceit and just turns into a normal modern CG-filled multi-camera format horror flick. Flipping back and forth from B&W to grainy color doesn’t lend any verisimilitude at all. The “behind the scenes footage” is hilarious. As if they had three or four handheld digital cameras going during the taping. GTFO.
100% my biggest issue with the movie. I’ve liked Dastmalchian in just about everything I’ve seen him in, but he was a miscast here. There’s no way “Jack Delroy” came anywhere near Carson in ratings.
Also NINE production company logos? Yeesh.
Oh, also, I’m surprised no one in this thread brought up the fact that infamously reclusive Joel Anderson director/writer of Lake Mungo was an EP on this.
Ha ha, so glad to hear you call this out! You can usually infer a little about what you’re about to watch by how many production logos precede a movie. Eventually, many of them become familiar, so then there’s a whole other level of information you can infer by how obscure they are. Or, of course, the lettering and language of the logos might reveal tells about European grants or Chinese money. But a movie with nine logos from studios I’d never heard of? Yeah, I’m about to watch either a challenging script or perhaps some misguided celebrity vehicle, or maybe just a “troubled project”!
Wow, nicely spotted, Nick! I knew Late Night with the Devil was an Aussie project, but not from anything in the actual movie. Instead, I had done homework, so I knew the two director/writers’ early work was very Australian. Seem like one of those 15 production logos was probably the Lake Mungo dude!
It’s a shame this is the only thing he’s worked on since Lake Mungo, other than that Adrien Grenier “did he or didn’t he?” mystery on Netfilix, Clickbait. He’s listed as a “script editor” for that. Yeesh. I mean, if you’ve only got one movie in you and it’s Lake Mungo, hey, no shade from me! Bravo! But it seems odd these are the only two things he’s worked on since 2008.
Not to sidetrack too much (hopefully) but what would one infer from the number of production logos seen in front of a movie? Too many cooks sort of thing?
I honestly thought that the production logos was a bit.
Not necessarily, since many of these might literally be ponying up money after the movie has been made. Others might be just hands-offs investors, and yet others are boutique studios that might shepherd a script all the way through production. A procession of studio logos doesn’t have to mean they all had creative input, or even that any of them had creative input. Some indie projects get made by corralling support among small investors/studios that like what they see and just want a piece of the pie.
It’s more about spotting clues like Chinese text meaning Chinese government censors were involved at some point (unless it’s Taiwan!); or if the words “capital” are in the name it’s probably just some investment firm but if it’s a familiar one (Bonit Media Capital, for instance) that probably implies something established or solid; the governments of different countries can have some national flavor which might imply a certain tone, but you probably know that from the movie’s nationality…unless you see logos from various different nationalities, in which case, oooooh, some sort of multi-national shoot!
Maybe the tone of the logo matters. A lot are no-nonsense “business cards”, but others might suggest a tone, and yet others are familiar enough to maybe even suggest a genre. I’m thinking of familiar creative animated sequences like Atomic Monster or Pixar or Scott Free’s oil-painted Edgar Allen Poe turns into a crow*. Those are some really big ones, but there are plenty of others that become familiar enough that you might possibly get a tiny hint of an inkling of what you’re about to watch. : )
And I can’t be the only one who plays a game with myself where I see how quickly I can say the name of the company as the logo comes up? The ones I recognize I get instantly, but some I kind of recognize and others I guess based on what I’m seeing. And it sometimes even works: “Uh, bear in the snow, bear in the street, brown bear, baby bear, winter bear, bear though the window pictures, boy sees bear pictures…Black Bear Pictures! Sweet, I totally got it, I’m sure I said Black Bear Pictures at some point! I rule!”
All that’s in my head, of course, but what else am I gonna do waiting for the movie to start?
* I have no idea if that’s what it actually is, but that’s what it looks like to me.
The nine logos before the movie starts didn’t bother me as much as the eight minutes of wordy set-up… and it didn’t get better from there. Darn! I’d heard this was supposed to be really good.
I’m actually really glad I had skimmed this thread prior to watching, because it ended up lowering my expectations enough that I ended up really enjoying it. I can’t disagree with most of the criticisms, but I had a fun time watching it and I’d call it better than average.
A positive post!
I’m with you. It wasn’t a terrible movie, and we grade horror movies on a curve anyway.
I just wish they had expanded the last 15 minutes to be more like half the movie - a lot of things are hinted at that could have really been fleshed out. Tell me more about your weird upper crust of society meetings with possibly pagan/demonic undertones.
What I would’ve liked would be: stick with “realistic” studio camera angles, throw in a few fake commercials, and use the hot mic/security footage approach for any behind the scenes footage.
Yes! Honestly that’s what I thought the movie was going to be, especially with Ironsides’ telling me it was going to be that in the beginning.
Michael Ironsides lied to us. : (
I do feel like I was largely able to suspend my disbelief with the camera angles (except for the final shot! Why move the camera there instead of keeping it static?! but it’s frustrating because the potential for something so much better is right there.