Late Night with the Devil

At a live taping of The Late Show with David Letterman, producers with headsets implored site author and the hundreds of fellow attendees to give the host maximal energy, so that Dave could reciprocate and put on a good show. Mics with the ability to pick up any crowd noise were conspicuously present in every row as we were urged to clap like cultists.

But the fact that there was some artifice and showbiz trickery behind the scenes is nothing compared with the goings-on in Late Night with the Devil, a period horror set against the backdrop of what some might call the Golden Era of the TV talk show, when Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin and company ruled the airwaves.

It was a time when crooners, comedians, mentalists and magicians competed for the public’s attention, and wide lapels looked like they could at any moment, swoop the wearer into mid-air.

Night Owls with Jack Delroy is the fictional competitor to Carson here, complete with Johnny mannerisms like tugging at the caller when a joke lands like an IED.

He’s got a sidekick and band too, but is a late night also-ran in the ratings department.

When a mentalist meets with an untimely end, and a parapsychologist extracts some weirdness from the lone survivor of a Branch Davidian-like compound, live on air…it’s soon revealed that the dapper Delroy has an unseemly backstory.

Late Night with the Devil somehow manages to effortlessly combine period, supernatural and body horror – with some dynamite practical effects to boot. But your connection to the proceedings could in part be contingent on your affinity for the medium of television.

Either way, we horror folks have been blessed with some stellar period horrors, whether it’s the kinetic Last Night in Soho or on-point X.

**** (out of 5)

Check out the Really Awful Movies Podcast discussion of Late Night with the Devil.

A reexamination of Night School

Night School gives us an education in unique horror movie deaths right off the bat when a Boston teacher’s aide’s dome is lopped off as she whips around a carousel.

It’s enough to make your head spin too.

We’re no experts in stranger danger, but she could’ve at least let go and taken her chances being shot out of a merry-go-round at full tilt. Then again, with playground equipment being what it was in the 80s, that probably would’ve proved fatal too.

This event, as it were, sets in motion a police investigation.

The Boston cops find out that the vic went to a local night school, justifying the title of this film, and soon fingers point to an instructor who’s rumored to be quite the perv.

And lest you think he would be a marketing or English teacher, as we’ve seen from other horror films, the best discipline to study when it comes to offering longwinded exposition about weird killings or sexual practises, is of course, anthropology.

The guy is obviously sus, but so is a local slow-witted café worker. Red herrings, on the menu, anyone?

The killer’s MO is to skulk around on a motorbike, giving this one a very very slight giallo flavour a la Andrea Bianchi’s Strip Nude For Your Killer.

If you’re into college horrors, something like Blumhouse’s Happy Death Day is far preferable, or the sillier and far more entertaining for all the wrong reasons, Graduation Day, also from 1981.

**1/2 (out of 5)