Late Night with the Devil: NZIFF Review

A genre film mixing pulp thrills and a recreation of a 70s late night talk show, Late Night with the Devil manages to be a canny extension of the found footage movie.

David Dastmalchian stars as late night host Jake Delroy, a "perennial also-ran" whose show Night Owls is continually running second to Johnny Carson. After his wife dies from cancer, Delroy begins plummeting further and so he plans a special Halloween outing for the show.

It may be gimmicky in parts, but Late Night with the Devil's desire to mix a solid recreation with the idea of the 70s Satanic Panic in the US create potent genre results that thrill as much as they amuse.

Blending cheesy lines with some genuinely unsettling moments and anchoring the film with Dastmalchian's committed performance amid the more than accurate period recreation, directors the Cairne brothers create a film that's rich on subtext as well as full-on scares when necessary. 

Cleverly mixing tropes and also giving a feeling it's all leading somewhere, Late Night with the Devil is a true fairground ride of a film. Mixing found footage with the master tape of what goes on during the breaks gives the film a kind of grounded feel before things go completely and inevitably ballistic. In parts though, it can't help but feel like a deliciously deviant Larry Sanders Show episode.

But not once do the directors devolve the film into the kind of trashy exploitation of the genre, preferring instead to let atmospherics and scares combine to make an experience that's deeply unsettling in parts, and crowd-pleasingly pulpy in others.