Directed by: Colin Cairnes & Cameron Cairnes
Written by: Colin Cairnes & Cameron Cairnes
Starring: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torelli, Rhys Auteri
Rating: [3/5]
The battle for ratings between late night shows finds victory by grabbing the attention of audiences and therefore grabbing a larger part of the market share. Therefore, getting bigger celebrities to interview usually helps or doing something salacious like displaying a demonic possession as seen in Late Night with the Devil. An act of desperation and one that continues to go down a spiral until the unimaginable happens.
Following tragedy in life, Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), the host of the late night TV show “Night Owls with Jack Delroy” returns and hopes to boost his ratings by having an occult-themed episode. With that he brings on experts and skeptics of this area, which leads to the inclusion of parapsychologist author Dr June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her subject 13-year-old Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli) who’s believed to be possessed by a demonic spirit.
Filmed in a way to present the film as archival footage of a night gone wrong, Late Night with the Devil brings its 70s aesthetic to feel like a time capsule. A moment in time where people stayed up and would religiously watch late night shows just like this one. On this Halloween night, Jack Delory and his team sought to create buzz in a different way and the documenting of it brought plenty of awkwardness and intrigue because of the subject matter at the center of the discussion. They brought on people who believed in the occult and then on particularly snarky individuals who spoke against it. As one can imagine by the title of the film that not everything goes necessarily well.
With the archival element of this film, we see the camera positioning in two different modes: one displaying the show live as if we watched it as audience members and then the behind the scenes during the commercial breaks. There we see the difference between Jack the performer and him as the competitor trying to push the limits of what gets put on broadcast. He continually pushes the boundaries even with others around him warning him to stop, particularly when we get to the scenes involving the demonic possession and just how far they will push the envelope. We know this whole fiasco will be terrible for those involved as indicated in the beginning of the film but we must just await how it will all happen.
Therefore, we have this show that goes from segment to segment discussing various elements of the occult from those different perspectives and to be honest, other than the possession that happens later, none of it felt entertaining. If it were a live television program I would have definitely shut it off because it weirdly got fairly stale and boring in moments. Often I would forget this was meant to be live television programming and it would shock me just how uninteresting it got, which I guess makes that possession scene all the more important for driving home the attention-grabbing headlines.
Getting to the possession scene showed the very best of the film where we get a mix of denialism by the occult skeptic but then what feels like irrefutable proof that something strange is happening here. It makes for an unsettling viewing experience as we see this girl let out a demon that’s been hanging over for her for some time now. This segment of the film hits all the hallmarks one would want in displaying a possession from the defying of physics, a weird creepy voice, and the revelation of information only something supernatural could possibly know. The only thing missing, evidently, was the girl spinning her head around. Everything happening in those final 20 minutes measures up to the promise of this story, I just wish the rest of the film met that standard.
Presenting an interesting idea in a fairly unengaging manner for the majority of its runtime, at the very least Late Night with the Devil delivers on its promise towards the end. It punctuates the film and solidifies what can happen when individuals like Jack decide to push the envelope in dangerous ways for the purposes of elevating his ratings and surpassing competitors. The film just did not do the best job in building up to the eventual incident we all came here to see, which makes this film somewhat a mixed bag.
Films with Josh 
