Late Night with the Devil is not just bullshit; it’s Penn & Teller: Bullshit-worthy bullshit. Most movies are bad because they lack quality; this one is bad because it lacks scruples and moral fiber. It is as spurious as the supernatural claims it supports, and as devious (and thank God, as sloppy) as the con artists it defends.
The bulk of the film consists of “the recently discovered master tape of” the 1977 Halloween episode of a late-night talk show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), “as well as previously unreleased behind-the-scenes footage.”
Jack’s first guest is psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi). The movie’s depiction of a self-proclaimed medium is suspiciously spot-on; Christou royally screws up a cold reading, and his technically accurate hot reading is, well, exactly that: a hot reading.
As it turns out, writers/directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes were just sacrificing a pawn. By exposing Christou as a fraud, they were undoubtedly hoping that we would deem their assessments of token skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss) and parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) to be similarly aboveboard — which most certainly is not the case.
In the end, the parapsychologist — whose book echoes the quote-unquote non-fiction best-seller Michelle Remembers, long discredited — is proven right (as is, by extension, the psychic), while the skeptic is proven wrong with extreme prejudice.
That is, of course, par for the course. It’s okay for demons to be real in works of fiction, and positive, factual portrayals of skeptics are only slightly less rare than the existence of demons in the real world. So, am I making a mountain out of a molehill? I wish I was.
The problem here is that Carmichael is a thinly veiled ad hominem attack on the late, great James ‘The Amazing’ Randi. Like Randi, Carmichael is a former illusionist-turned-investigator whose foundation offers a cash prize to any applicant who can demonstrate genuine psychic powers.
Moreover, Carmichael describes himself as “a liar, a cheat, a charlatan, and a fake. The difference being, I’m honest about it.” It just so happens to be that a 2014 documentary on the life and times of Randi is titled An Honest Liar.
Those particulars having been established, Carmichael-Randi is thoroughly misrepresented as “a self-righteous, coldhearted curmudgeon” who likes to play “mean tricks” on the poor pseudoscientist (who in turn is depicted as genuinely caring about her young, intermittently possessed ward, rather than merely exploiting and manipulating her), and who when get things get dicey is shown to be a coward and a hypocrite, right before having his face melted like the Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I don’t think (though I’m perhaps being over-optimistic) anyone is going to mistake Night Owls for a real mid-to-late 1970’s TV show (the use of obvious CGI is a dead giveaway, although if that, ahem, technology had existed back then, it would probably have looked as primitive as it does in this movie), but the fact remains that it is a perversely deliberate inversion of what would have actually gone down.
In real life, Randi would have invariably gotten the better of any hack, like he did with alleged faith healer Peter Popoff on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (often mentioned as Jack’s direct competition).
Furthermore, it’s perfectly admissible to rip stuff from the headlines and incorporate it into your script, but there comes a responsibility with that — even in a low-budget, low-profile horror flick. It’s not so much the baseless, uncalled-for posthumous fuck you to James Randi; something tells me he wouldn’t have taken it personally.
However, when you’re basically vindicating a modern-day witch hunt like the so-called Satanic Panic and, in order to make your point, you’re also ridiculing a man who was while living a huge voice of reason in a world increasingly gone mad (and who can’t defend himself from beyond the grave because there’s no such thing), that’s where the filmmakers might have wanted to think about drawing a line.
The Cairnes brothers don’t entirely strike me as true believers hailing from the lunatic fringe, seeing as how their film is relatively too coherent — and yet, like most paranormal/supernatural narratives, it can’t help coming undone due to a lack of internal logic.
Never mind that Night Owls airs “live” at “midnight,” whereas late-night talk shows are as a rule taped earlier in the day and then broadcast on TV. What really sticks out like a sore thumb is that the third act takes places mostly in Jack’s head, seemingly a mix of memories and visions. Are we truly expected to believe that this is part of the aforementioned “previously unreleased behind-the-scenes footage”? That dog won’t hunt, Monsignor.
All things considered, it’s not impossible that the filmmakers are, like Jack, simply wondering, “What is the harm for those of us who just want to believe in something mysterious, something bigger than ourselves?” I wish they had made a movie that sought to answer that question, instead of just asking it. They might have been surprised.
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