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The likes of The Orphanage and The Conjuring have shown that the recent past is not just a foreign country, but a downright scary one. This horror, also set in the 1970s, lies on the same kitsch-uncanny continuum, with a fine ambassador in the shape of sickly faced David Dastmalchian, playing on-the-wane US late-night variety show host Jack Delroy. Seen creeping it up everywhere in character roles over the last few years – from a Harkonnen mentat in Dune to one of Oppenheimer’s detractors, as well as Suicide Squad’s Polka-Dot Man – Dastmalchian gets a well-deserved lead role here.
An initial corporate promo fills us in on Delroy’s résumé: perennial second fiddle in the ratings war to Johnny Carson; sometime member of an Illuminati-style lodge; widowered when his wife, Madeleine, is struck down by lung cancer. Making a shaky comeback from this tragedy, everything seems to rest on his 1977 Halloween special, whose master tapes, we are told, make up what we see in Late Night With the Devil. His first guest, Christou the psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), is forced off after a bout of Exorcist-style vomiting – allowing his second guest, twirly tached paranormal debunker Carmichael (Ian Bliss), to spoil the party. So “Mr Midnight” is keen to make up ground in his third item: parapsychologist June (Laura Gordon) and her teenage ward Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a former cult hostage who is supposedly host to a minor demon.
Writer-directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes – who sound like a light-entertainment act themselves – capably bottle the strained ersatzness of studio television and shake it up into droll fizz: “Ladies and gentlemen, please stay tuned for a live television first, as we attempt to commune with the devil. But not before a word from our sponsors.” The black and white B-roll footage between segments is where the dapper but mildly exploitative Delroy reveals his careerist colours, like a vampiric Jimmy Fallon with slip-ons and sideburns.
While the horrors behind 70s TV bonhomie are now common knowledge, thanks to Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and their ilk, the Cairnes brothers don’t cut quite through to anything genuinely disturbing. Even the blow-out occult finale, featuring some impressive FX work, remains stuck in the realm of unchallenging primetime blarney (albeit a bloodsoaked version). But the directors and Dastmalchian – high on his own bogus gravitas – have fun with a fresh premise that reminds us that light entertainment is the anteroom of hell.
• Late Night With the Devil is in UK cinemas from 22 March and Australian cinemas from 11 April.
