Flying under the radar was ‘Late Night with the Devil’ – not the pilot title for the rumoured Amanda Holden chat show but a film / documentary purporting to be the recovered tape of a US chat show that went catastrophically awry. Starring David Dastmalchian (The Suicide Squad) in the lead role as chat show host Jack Delroy and co-starring Laura Gordon , Ian Bliss and an excellent Ingrid Torelli as a possibly possessed teenager.
Late Night with the Devil is set in 1977 where late-night talk show host Jack Delroy’s ratings are in free fall. In a desperate bid to revive his show, Jack plans a Halloween special like no other. He invites a psychic, a sceptic, and, as the main attraction, parapsychologist author June (Gordon) and her subject Lily (Torelli) – a 13-year-old survivor of a satanic cult who claims to be possessed – to join him in the studio. Broadcasting live, Jack sits down for a tête-à-tête with his unpredictable and very risky guests, unaware of the unimaginable terror he’s about to unleash. Witness what really happened on set in this shockingly unbelievable footage of the infamous late-night recording, if you dare.
Directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes had made a couple of horror films prior to this all in the low budget independent film filed and to contain costs their single setting would be a TV studio where the infamous episode occurs. They had shown their script to Joel Anderson whose 2008 film Lake Mungo was a terrific yet under rated documentary style horror and well worth seeking out. Impressed with the script he agreed to act as an executive producer and got it in front of the right people to finance and distribute.
Setting the up the back ground to the film is a short documentary style intro that sets out Delroy’s rise up the rating ladder that gets him a syndicated chat show that he is determined should over take Johnny Carson. But after the tragic death of his wife and a number of murky stories about his own background he returns to his chat show with a Halloween episode that pulls out all the stops that builds to a calamitous and shocking finale.
After The Bair Witch Project, now unbelievably 25 years old, the world was inundated with fake found footage documentaries many of which were beyond dreadful usually with a ludicrous set up and/or failing to stick to the rules of the genre. Late Night with the Devil mostly succeeds setting up the film as a tape of the show but does break the rules of the genre when the show goes to the adverts and yet the studio camera follows the characters in handheld style behind the set far removed from the tradition of the TV studio cameras at the time. Yet it doesn’t take away from what is an engrossing drama as the live show ups the ante. The cast are good – David Dastmalchian’s host ever eager for ratings refuses to stop the on camera antics, Ian Bliss, as a kind of James Randi figure, is equally keen to discredit what he perceives as merely an illusionist’s stage show, Rhys Auteri as the chat show sidekick and the Everyman of the piece soon realizing that the show is spiralling out of control, Laura Gordon as the earnest parapsychologist who has adopted a child rescued from a Satanic cult and Ingrid Torelli as the child in question with a disconcerting stare and the centre of what will unfold.
Unlike so many disc releases of contemporary releases this one has a whole host of great bonus features but then it comes from Second Sight Films who have established themselves as the market leader in how to do Home Entertainment discs properly. Those bonus features are:
- UHD presented in HDR with Dolby Vision
New audio commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson
- Bringing Their ‘A’ Game: an interview with directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes
- Mind if I Smoke?: An interview with actor Ian Bliss
- We’re Gonna Make a Horror Movie: an interview with actor Ingrid Torelli
- Extremely Lucky: An interview with actor Rhys Auteri
- Cult Hits: Zoë Rose Smith on Late Night with The Devil
- Behind the Scenes
- The Making of The Night Owl music
- South by Southwest 2023 Q&A with David Dastmalchian, Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes Limited Edition Contents
- Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Haley Turnbull
- 120-page book with behind-the-scenes images and new essays by Kat Hughes, James Rose, Rebecca Sayce, Graham Skipper, Julieann Stipidis and Emma Westwood
- Six collectors’ art cards
Best of these is ‘Bringing their A-game’ with both directors explaining how the film began and it’s a pity that they have not done the commentary too as they’re an engaging pair. The interviews with Ian Bliis. Rhys Auteri and Ingrid Torelli are good too with Torelli’s real life persona having something of an ethereal quality that made her ideal casting. And the ‘behind the scenes’ is worth a look but only AFTER you’ve watched the film as the featurette with on set recordings of the whole film of what was a short shoot with much of the film shot in long takes up to 12 minutes at a time as opposed to the few minutes a day a film usually targets.
With Halloween on the way Late Night with the Devil is ideally suited for late night home viewing and this is a worthy addition to the found footage genre
related feature : Mickey Mouse get murderous in new horror film, ‘The Mouse Trap’ – director Jamie Bailey & star Simon Phillips takes us BTS and the Disney copyright nightmare
related feature : The face of ‘Longlegs’……
Here’s the Late Night with the Devil trailer…..
Late Night with the Devil Limited Edition 4K UHD /Blu-ray Dual Box set released on 28th October 2024
