A Johnny Carson rival looks for ratings boost
The year is 1977. Johnny Carson rules late night. At the Academy Awards, “Network” loses to “Rocky” for best picture. “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” the sequel to the most successful horror film of all-time, opens in theaters. And Jack Delray, Carson’s low-rent rival at another network, is in ratings trouble.
“Late Night With the Devil,” a found-footage horror movie and ’70s talk show parody about a Halloween special that goes spectacularly wrong, is not only a fresh take on the genre, but provides a rare feature film lead role for the always-welcome David Dastmalchian. The character actor with a cult following is known for comic book movies (“The Dark Knight,”“Ant-Man and the Wasp” and “The Suicide Squad”); his 2023 output included “Oppenheimer,” the lead in the Ridley Scott-produced Hulu film “Boston Strangler” and the 19th century seafaring horror film “The Last Voyage of the Demeter.”
In “Late Night,” Dastmalchian puts his sleepy eyes and angular features to good use as the host of “Night Owls With Jack Delroy,” which, like Carson’s “The Tonight
Show,” has an emcee/foil (Rhys Auteri), a house band and a spartan set where he interviews guests.
A brief introduction — with Michael Ironside imitating Lee Richardson’s voice-over work in “Network,” Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 savage parody of network television — tells us that Delray has spent seven years trying to match Carson’s ratings with his show on rival network UBC (an echo of the UBS of “Network”). When Jack’s wife (Georgina Haig) dies of cancer, he takes a long sabbatical. When he returns, ratings are at a crisis point and cancellation looms.
So he and his production team put together, for “sweeps week” — the period when Nielsen ratings set advertising rates — the Halloween special to end all Halloween specials. The warmup act is a psychic, Christou (Fayssal Bazzi); the main event is a clash
between ex-magician and now debunker Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss) and Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), who brings her possessed young charge Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), looking very much like Linda Blair’s character in “The Exorcist.”
Need we point out that this is a very bad idea?
The film unfolds as “found footage” — a recently rediscovered
videotape of the broadcast.
There are so many things to enjoy about “Late Night With the Devil.” The writer-directors are brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes, who, incredibly, are not only way too young to remember Carson, but are also Australian. How could they be so spot-on? They perfectly capture the ’70s media landscape, with a set that looks like a cross between “The
Tonight Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show.”
Dastmalchian is, as always, terrific, and special mention should be made of the charismatic Torelli, who makes the most of her brief scenes.
Although this is technically a horror film, it isn’t super scary, although there are some great lowbudget effects near the end. The main problem with “Late Night With the Devil” is that this episode of “Night Owls” is kind of a middling one. If you watch YouTube clips of 1970s “Tonight Show” or “Dick Cavett” episodes, they move faster and with more interesting conversations than this.
Nonetheless, this is an irresistible throwback to not only oldschool horror, but old-school television. Perhaps the real-life “Tonight Show” episode this movie most resembles is the classic night in 1973 in which Carson attempted to expose spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller.
Carson did indeed foul up Geller’s act, but inadvertently made him a media celebrity as a result. Jack Delray might relate.