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Film: Late Night with the Devil
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

If you have any connection with the skeptic community, you know who James Randi, also known as The Amazing Randi, was and what his career was about. Randi started as a magician and escape artist, but eventually became a professional debunker. Randi, who was a good friend of Johnny Carson, used to appear on Carson’s show to debunk psychics and clowns like Uri Geller, showing how the tricks were done. His organization had a $1 million prize for anyone who could demonstrate any psychic or paranormal skill or ability, a prize that went unclaimed for Randi’s entire life. I say all of this because it’s going to be relevant in Late Night with the Devil, since there is a character clearly based on Randi.

However, that’s not where we are going to start. Late Night with the Devil is going to give us an alternative history of the late night television wars by introducing us to Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a Chicago radio host-turned-late night television host. Delroy hosts a show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy, and competes unsuccessfully with Johnny Carson. The movie takes place in 1977, during the sixth season of the show. Desperate for ratings, Delroy decides to up the ante during sweeps week on Halloween. We’re told that while the show was broadcast live, this is the first time it has been seen since that broadcast.

We’re going to get a lot of background on Delroy. We learn, for instance, that the best ratings he ever got for a show was the night his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig), a couple of weeks away from dying of cancer, was his guest. But even that kept him in second place to Carson. We also learn of his connection to a group called “The Grove,” an all-male collective of the rich and powerful that might be like the Playboy Club, might be like Skull and Bones, and might be something much more dire and terrible.

The show in question is Halloween, 1977, and Jack Delroy is desperate for ratings. The idea he has is to create an occult-themed show with guests who skew toward the weirder ends of magic and the paranormal. First out is Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a medium who, in a movie that didn’t include the paranormal would be making connections to the other side through techniques like cold reading. He has a few hits and misses, but then has a very strange episode that feels like a miss, but also feels violently wrong in a lot of ways. His next guest is Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), the Randi adjunct, who does what he can to debunk Christou, at least until Christou suddenly vomits a huge amount of black liquid and is taken off stage and sent to the hospital, eventually dying en route.

It's the third and fourth guests who are the money shot for this show (and the movie). These are June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli). June is a parapsychologist and author, and Lilly is her current subject. In a short documentary-style clip, we learn that Lilly is the sole survivor of a mass suicide at a Satanic cult. Again, desperate for ratings, Jack convinces June to conjure the demon Abraxis—the center of worship of the cult—into Lilly, or at least to bring him out. And from here, some very bad things are going to happen, and eventually, no matter who much Carmichael Haig tries to debunk them, he can’t seem to find a way to do so.

There’s a lot to genuinely like with this film. One is that this feels a great deal like a found footage movie without actually being a found footage movie. Technically, it is found footage, but instead of shaky cams and yelling, it’s found footage from a television studio. It genuinely looks like a mid-‘70s show as well. It looks exactly like it should, and that adds a great deal to it feeling like the real thing. If all found footage movies looked like this, I’d be a lot more likely to like them.

There is a sense in many movies that deal with demonic possession and the like of very specific expectation. What Late Night with the Devil does extremely well is play to those expectations, giving us a great deal of what we want, and subverting them at the same time. This is a smart movie. We can sense where it’s going, and it doesn’t always get there in the way that we think it’s going to.

The genius of the film is that because it has that specific look and feel, it genuinely feels like the real thing. It feels genuine. The only way it could do this better would be to use entirely unknown actors. The fact that David Dastmalchian has been in a lot lately is the main thing that kills this feeling. That, and the fact that it doesn’t portray the Randi clone in the positive are my main complaints, and both of these are pretty small.

Why to watch Late Night with the Devil: For a film that feels like a standard possession film, it’s not a standard possession film.
Why not to watch: It doesn’t do James Randi any favors.