phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2024

Late Night with the Devil



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 33m
Country: Australia, United Arab Emirates, USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror
Plot Summary: A live television broadcast in 1977 goes horribly wrong, unleashing evil into the nation's living rooms.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: The real star of this movie is the art department. Everything is so very 70s, and very detailed, especially the mini-documentary at the beginning. There’s also finally an answer to why a found footage movie would be edited: it’s a recording of a live TV show, edited on the fly at the time. For the most part it’s like watching an old late night TV talk show, and your enjoyment is going to based on how you feel about that. I thought it was a fun time machine to a parallel universe in the past, but that means it comes with all the pacing and trappings of that specific television format. David Dastmalchian’s performance of human flop sweat is great, and he anchors an increasingly surreal episode of the Bizarro Tonight Show.


Outside Reviews:

Matt Zoller Seitz
2 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Is there any scenario in which “Late Night with the Devil” could have delivered on its promise? I’m not seeing it. Set in 1977, the movie envisions a nonexistent fourth commercial broadcast network (there were only three back then) and then imagines a competitor emerging to take down the reigning king of late night talk shows in the ’70s, Johnny Carson. The rival is Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a local Chicago talk show host who was bumped up to the national level. This backstory and more is explained in a five-minute prologue that includes one key biographical fact I’ll skip here, because once you hear it, you can see the ending coming from 81 minutes away.


Matthew Jackson
A - A stunning, high-concept 1970s nightmare

How exactly you achieve this sense of forbidden viewing is hard to pin down, which makes it all the more magical when the feeling connects, when an audience member sinks deep into the immersive experience of the film and gasps and screams right along with the characters. Sometimes it’s a matter of production design, or photography, or simple conceptual brilliance. Sometimes it’s all three and more. Through a combination of these factors, and a ferocious, magnetic lead performance by David Dastmalchian, Late Night With The Devil achieves that rare feat of feeling like something we were never supposed to see. But once we’ve seen it, we can’t look away.