"Late Night With the Devil"

   ☆☆☆ 

After a much longer moviegoing break than I anticipated due to unexpected crises, I returned to the place whose specialness has been made banal by Nicole Kidman's endless insistence that it's magic: the cinema. Yup, Nicole's still there, albeit in a mercifully shorter, still hilariously self-serving sort of way. And the movie I saw wasn't especially good, though it wasn't particularly bad, either, but that's the point: Late Night With the Devil, a low-budget Australian horror film, is exactly the kind of movie that benefits from being seen in a movie theater.

Is it worth the ever-increasing cost of a night out at the movies? Maybe not. Then again, I'm still a member in what is one of the worst-conceived ideas in movie history: a moviegoing subscription service. These services, like the scam MoviePass that triggered the craze to charge moviegoers one price each month and give them (at one point) unlimited movies, have only cheapened the experience. To members of these programs, movies have become, essentially, worthless. Between these programs and streaming services, the concept of moviegoing has, for too many people, become something without value. It is a cheap, throwaway experience that can, if played right, cost as little as a couple of bucks for a show.

It's natural, I suppose, that "content producers," those behemoths that used to be called movie studios, have responded by releasing comparatively few movies on the big screen, and doing all they can to ensure those movies are big, loud, dumb and popular.

So, how does a movie like Late Night With the Devil even make it into theaters? In this case, perhaps chalk it up to last year's crisis-level strikes by actors and writers, which have left those places formerly called studios with far too little "content" to release to both theaters and streaming services; and to the time of year. Springtime has always been horror time, and horror excels at low budgets with few stars.

David Dastmalchian, an actor you've undoubtedly seen but wouldn't know by name, is the star of Late Night With the Devil. The movie is a riff on the "found-footage" horror trope that's been going on since The Blair Witch Project (which, I hate to break it to you, was 25 years ago now). In this case, the movie purports to be a combination of video that aired on TV in 1977, and never-before-seen backstage footage of the event that, so the movie proposes, galvanized audiences. The incident was an exorcism that aired on a syndicated late-night TV talk show.

The most interesting thing to me about Late Night With the Devil is how it was made by a streaming service (Shudder) to be shown on television, but is a movie I would have absolutely no patience for at home. It's slow to start, relies on insider knowledge about the TV industry, and assumes a desire to see a gentle satire of television as it existed nearly 50 years ago. By the time the movie gets to its core story, I would have long lost interest and found something else to watch. That's the thing about "television" today: There is always something else to watch. Too much.

But in a movie theater, in that space Nicole Kidman insists is "magic," you've got only a few choices: pay attention, fall asleep (or maybe turn your attention to your date, if so inclined), or leave. (Sadly, there's an increasingly popular fourth option: play on your phone. I don't condone that.) Usually, stuck in a dark room and knowing we've paid money—at least, we used to—and made the effort to be there, we opt for the first choice. That's what I did with Late Night With the Devil. I would never, ever have done that at home.

It's okay. It's not great, but it doesn't need to be. It's an attention-grabber, it's weird, it's funny, and it's enough. It kept me entertained, I got a night out with my husband, we felt we were taking part in life, and we had something to talk about on the way home. There was a time, a very good and very long time, we didn't expect or demand much more of our movies than that. Late Night With the Devil reminded me of those times. I miss those times. I hope Hollywood gets its act together soon and remembers the movies, even so-so ones, belong in movie theaters. Late Night With the Devil wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but all in all, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Viewed April 6, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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