REVIEW:
Late Night with the Devil was a pretty good movie. In fact, for two-thirds of the film, it was pretty great. It’s only the final third that gets too carried away and loses us. But for most of the way through, this is an excellent film. The premise is that we are behind the scenes of a late night talk show for just one night and one show. It’s Halloween Eve. And the host of the show has decided to have on as guests for the evening people who summon the dead. First, he invites on a man who specializes in disproving claims about spirits and making contact with him. Next, he invites of a hallucinist, who can indeed make contact with the dead. Watching the disbeliever make claims about how the hallucinist is “doing tricks,” is a lot of fun. So are the things that happen with an to the hallucinist.
This has all been the first third of the movie. For the second third, our host invites on a girl and her therapist. The girl is able to contact the devil. And for a while, this is pretty great. It involves levitating, taking on a different face, and all sorts of scary moments that are reminiscent of the Exorcist. But then in the last third, everything goes to hell. This starts with the disbeliever guest doing a trick of his own, which is pretty neat. But what’s not neat is that he doesn’t explain how he did it. You see, the whole point of his demonstration is to show us that these spiritual people are fakes, and that what they are doing in front of our eyes are really just illusions. And he sort of explains that by having the people working the show play back the tape of what just happened, to see that what they remember happening and saw happening is not what really happened. But then how did he do the trick and make it seem like these things were happening? It is never explained.
And then it gets worse, when the little girl becomes even more possessed than before and we get our climax. I’m all for there being an extreme climax that is scary and even gross, but this one just seems too unbelievable. You see, the cool thing about the whole movie up until that point was that it seemed to be set in a very real world, including a band leader who interacts with the host, producers who come over and talk to the host everytime there is a commercial break, and a live studio audience. By the end of the movie, we have lost that. It’s more than just that what happens is so unbelievable, it’s also that it’s not clear. This is a really good movie, with its documentary-like feel of going behind the scenes on the talk show. And I like that it is only about an hour and a half. Generally short running time movies mean they trimmed a lot of fat to give us only the best content. And that’s true for the most part here, where the movie works really well all the way until the end.