Found-footage horror — that thing you never want to see again, until once every couple years someone finds a fresh angle — meets “The King of Comedy,” of all things, in “Late Night With the Devil.” The third feature from enterprising Aussie siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes kicks up a notch their flair for bringing novel twists to familiar genre tropes, by positing occult mayhem during a live broadcast of a 1970s network talk show.
The resulting mix of vintage Me Decade showbiz cheese and “Exorcist”-y demonic doings is distinctive, not to mention deftly handled by the brothers as both writers and directors. Well-received at its SXSW premiere, this clever high-concept gambit should raise its makers’ profile, likely inviting some Hollywood offers — which one suspects they’d be open to, given this is their first project set (though not produced) in the U.S. rather than on home turf.
An eight-minute black-and-white opening sequence establishes the Seventies as a “time of unrest and mistrust, fear and violence” — a view that might surprise those who experienced it as calm after those turbulent Sixties — balmed by mainstream televisual entertainment. Serving that purpose is “Night Owls with Jack Delroy,” a standard chat/variety program whose unctuous host (David Dastmalchian) “five nights a week helps an anxious nation forget its troubles,” as initial voiceover narrator MIchael Ironside informs us. He also notes that Jack’s relative success nonetheless always fell short of Johnny Carson’s ratings and Emmys, giving him a reputation as a “perennial also-ran.”
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This despite Delroy’s membership in mysterious power enclave The Grove, “a men-only club located in the redwoods of California” (à la the real-life Bohemian Grove), and his happy marriage to a glamorous stage star. Once she dies of cancer, the show’s fortunes seem to plummet, no matter what bids for attention-getting controversy it makes.
The narrative proper begins on Halloween night of its sixth season in 1977, with all pressure to spike ratings only increased by Sweeps Week. In line with the spooky holiday, the guests lined up are all affiliated in one way or another with the supernatural. There is psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), who attempts to read audience members’ minds. He is irked to soon be joined by the erstwhile Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), an ex-magician turned irritatingly smug skeptic and professional debunker.
Then there’s parapsychologist and author Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), whose new book is entitled “Conversations With the Devil.” She’s brought along its subject: Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a disquietingly self-assured teen who was sole survivor to a Satanic church’s mass suicide, and has been the doc’s patient in the three years since. Lilly is purportedly afflicted by a demon she calls “Mr. Wiggles,” just as little Regan was beset by “Captain Howdy” in “The Exorcist.” Desperate to create a sensation, and overriding her caretaker’s concerns, Jack and his producers insist the girl conjure up that entity on air. Needless to say, this proves a very, very bad idea.
All hell starts breaking loose before the one-hour point, and at first these goings-on further underline the sense of homage to Williams Friedkin and Blatty’s horror classic. But “Late Night” — which unfolds in episodic chunks from a “recently rediscovered master tape of what went to air that night,” the commercial breaks filled by behind-the-scenes glimpses — feels fresh thanks to the satiric gloss of its retro boob-tube-fodder framework. As the specter of mental illness lent a sinister, predatory edge to a showbiz milieu in “The King of Comedy,” flirting with occult forces here similarly turns kitsch into critique of the bottomless thirst for fame, and the Faustian risks involved in slaking it.
This isn’t the scariest movie, but neither is it entirely a self-conscious joke. The Cairnes maintain an astute balance between pop-culture irony, familiar if not always predictable thrills (including some creature/gore FX), and a kind of hallucinatory mass-media surrealism — one that recalls the title of a 1970s cautionary tome about TV, “The Plug-In Drug.”
Otello Stolfo’s production designer and Stephanie Hooke’s costumes get the era’s aesthetics of Middle American taste down pat; ditto cinematographer Matthew Temple and the Cairnes’ own editing its technical presentation. Eventually the lines blur between Roscoe James Irwins’ theme music for the show-within-the-movie (Rhys Auteri plays Jack’s onstage band conductor/sidekick) and Glenn Richards’ original score, just as the characters grow unsure whether what’s transpiring is mere “entertainment” or living nightmare.
The actors, too, refrain from caricature to the right degree. Dastmalchian, concurrently playing Albert DeSalvo in Hulu’s “Boston Strangler” (while on big screens in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”), lends Delroy an amiable mediocrity that explains both his popularity and its limits. Bliss and Bazzi are effective slightly underplaying potentially cartoonish figures, Gordon convinces as a publicity-savvy expert used to being disbelieved, and Torelli is appropriately eerie in what several wobblier recent horrors have underlined is always the trickiest part: the child meant to harbor great evil.
Though not quite a slam-dunk — its sum impact is more pleasingly ingenious than indelible — “Late Night With the Devil” definitely reps a personal best for the Cairnses. Their 2012 debut feature, above-average Ozzie comedy-horror “100 Bloody Acres,” and its entertaining if less memorable 2016 followup “Scare Campaign” were both solid efforts. But their latest suggests they’ve got the imagination to explore new terrain within (or beyond) genre bounds, not just bury a few extra landmines amidst stock narrative premises.
