In the Flesh: Late Night with the Devil

David Dastamalchian does a lot of things very well. Conjuring up a believable turn as a late-night talk show host, it turns out, isn’t one of them. Late-night host Jack Delroy’s as flat as a pancake and as deep as a puddle, a cardboard cutout with “protagonist” scribbled across it, and there’s nothing in Dastamalchian’s performance that so much as hints at anything interesting behind this feeble characterization. It’s not that a low-budget exorcism flick needs to conjure up a Stephen Dedalus or a Judge Holden to succeed, it’s that screenwriting is what separates shoestring flicks with heart from lifeless, sodden monster-of-the-week garbage. Late Night with the Devil isn’t quite that bad, but neither does it attain the giddy heights of “fun but flawed.” It feels like a second pass screenplay with first cut performances and some enthusiastic but unimpressive special effects. There’s just nothing done with much flair or insight here. Not even Michael Ironside’s rumbling bass growl can salvage the shoddiness of the film’s found footage conceit, which shoves us into the story with an onslaught of bland exposition you could sum up as “TV guy wants to unseat Carson. Then his wife dies.”

The show within the film, Delroy’s Night Owls, is a pretty lackluster affair, and the script just isn’t up to the task of evoking that unique mixture of Vaudevillian mock-stupidity, semi-ironic patter, sincerity, and repartee that is the American late-night talk show. The show seems to lack any kind of format, existing as a sort of amorphous entity adjusted to suit the flow of events as the plot dictates. Delroy has no bits, no catchphrases, no real presence on the stage. Indeed he even changes seats frequently as the film progresses, robbing the program of the centered feeling provided by the host unmoving at his desk. It’s a flat, listless show for a flat, listless man. He wants to be number one in his time slot? He’s part of some secret occult society? What connects these flimsy traits? What drives Jack Delroy to unleash Hell on teenage abuse survivor Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) and her exploiter/therapist/caretaker, the parapsychologist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon)? The black-and-white backstage footage during commercial breaks should provide some glimpse of the human behind the sorcery, but it feels more like visual muzak than it does texture. A placeholder until we can get back to the on-air proceedings.

In a final twist we learn that the supernatural mayhem Lilly unleashed was either an illusion or has been undone somehow, and that Jack himself has snapped and murdered all his guests on live TV. For that kind of bait and switch to work we’ve got to care about the characters more than we care about narrative structure, and Late Night with the Devil gives us nothing in either column. The much-protested use of AI to produce several inter-titles ends up being the least of the film’s aesthetic concerns (first and foremost, AI is a labor issue), but that kind of short-sightedness is everywhere throughout the entire production. Weak performances and a sloppy script consign Late Night with the Devil, like Delroy himself, to the status of also-ran.