Film Box
I just saw Late Night with the Devil and it was pretty good. Presented as a documentary that leads into a restored broadcast spliced with behind-the-scenes footage, it tells the story of a 1977 late show programme on Halloween night, hosted by recently widowed media persona Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian).
To restore his ailing programme, the slick and handsome Delroy draws on the arcane rituals of his buddies at Bohemian Grove (a real-life social club for rich men that’s been subject to Freemason-esque conspiracy theories), bringing on to the show a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and her charge (Ingrid Torelli), the sole survivor of a cult, who claims to be in touch with a demon…
The “Satanic panic” subgenre is one that I enjoy but have mixed feelings about… ethically. The genre refers to a moral panic in American history, specifically the 1980s, where anxieties about child molesters hiding in positions of power - doctors, teachers, daycare operators - were expressed as a religious pushback against “Satanists”.
There were literal children’s books warning what signs to look for when you think that your child might be being abused by devil-worshippers. This led to some atrocious miscarriages of justice and went on to inspire the oppression - including hate crimes - of youth movements, like goths, and such non-traditional religious practices as Wicca.
I try hard to not judge the audience when watching a movie since it’s almost always a mistake. If someone leaves an action film and gets into a punch-up, that’s down to their stupidity and lack of impulse control, not the product.
But in the case of Satanic panic films, I do get uncomfortably aware that it’s playing in part to the type of people who appear in Borat movies talking about how Hillary Clinton is a witch, and walk into busy pizza restaurants with guns demanding to know where the Bohemian Grove sex slaves are. It’s not the film’s fault that they’re coo coo bananas, but it’s in the back of my mind anyway.
My favourite character in Late Night was the James Randi stand-in, Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), a skeptic and philanthropic debunker of mediums. (The film satirically refers to Randi’s famous encounter with spoon-bending charlatan Uri Gellar on The Tonight Show.)
Carmichael is depicted as condescending and arrogant, and I do like the last cynical joke about Randi’s famous offer of a huge pay-check to anyone who can prove their mediumship. Yet he’s right, isn’t he? In anything like the real world, he’d be the least cynical and most righteous person in that room. When he says that he feels responsible for the sanity and safety of the “possessed” girl, I believe him.
Late Night with the Devil is an occasionally creepy and pretty much always engaging example of the “found footage” style. It’s easily one of the best of that style, though that’s not saying much. The ‘70s are well-evoked and Dastmalchian is nigh on perfect in his depiction of that very era-specific type of host: he captures that slimy masculine charm that’s filled with rank ambition and assumptions, the slick arrogance that positions itself as the unquestionable, heteronormative ideal.
Looking back at male presenters from this era, it’s remarkable how unlikeable many are from a modern perspective. For every Michael Parkinson and Terry Wogan, who managed to seem at least tolerant, there are those that constantly sneer at anyone not like them (‘Can you believe this guy?’ they seem to be saying to the audience, ‘Wearing eyeliner and calling himself Ziggy Stardust? What a freak!’) and getting too close to any woman or girl on their set.
I do think that there remains a story to be told in the horror genre about this world. Late Night with the Devil is a fun and even thrilling, at times, reflection on familiar themes. But imagine a “restored broadcast” where the possessed child may well just be a victim of exploitation by greedy and predatory adults.
In this hypothetical film, there are no unquestionably supernatural theatrics and you don’t really see behind the scenes, except glimpses through the gaps between walls (which would justify why the footage exists; Late Night has that problem, endemic to mockumentaries, where there’s no reason why cameras would be trained on a lot of the conversations).
A lot of the tension would come not from whether or not a demon is in the room so much as why the host keeps getting uncomfortably close to the girl, sharing looks with the audience as if daring them to say something. Meanwhile, the girl’s carer is glimpsed saying something to a producer close by a camera that happens to pick it up. ‘I don’t like it’ she says. ‘That’s just his way’ the producer replies.
And then the seance happens and the girl in a fugue state starts saying weird and suggestive things. Things about men surrounding her at night and a cruel woman forcing her to do things. Things that make the assembled personalities uncomfortable. ‘What’s going on here?’ says the Randi character to the host. In the end you’re left to wonder: was there a presence in the room, or did we just witness a troubled child being exploited for entertainment? Or both?
I don’t know, maybe that movie would only be interesting to me.
Rating: 3/4
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I just saw Love Lies Bleeding and it was really good. A lesbian romance crossed with a crime drama and set in the 1980s, it stars Kristen Stewart as a mulleted gym clerk, Lou, whose father, Lou Sr (Ed Harris), is a dangerous criminal in the Nevada desert. One day a young woman called Jackie (Katy O'Brian) rolls into town with dreams of building up her body mass so that she can go to Las Vegas and win a contest.
Lou and Jackie fall for one another, but complications arise when JJ (Dave Franco), Lou Sr’s employee and his daughter Beth’s (Jena Malone) abusive, philandering husband, puts Beth in the hospital. High on steroids, Jackie sees Lou’s pain for her sister and does something there’s no coming back from…
Initially, I asked myself why this story needed to be set in the 1980s, if it was just for the score and the picturesque fashions (like Jackie’s shell suit). But this is a story of its chosen period. Domestic abuse is still a pressing issue, of course, but how it’s dealt with here is very much attached to a bygone age. (One would hope.)
Beth won’t press charges, so the police won’t take an interest (especially since a lot of them are in Lou Sr’s pocket), and her father’s approach is to have a talk with JJ. Meanwhile, Lou Sr’s own wife has been “gone” for years. This is very much a paternalistic, “father knows best” world where girls are raised to be seen and enjoyed and raise the children, but certainly not heard.
Meanwhile, men do the important work and feel constantly entitled to women’s time, space, and bodies. The unspoken subtext about Jackie (or “Jack”, as Lou calls her) is that she became obsessed with bodybuilding as a way to defend herself against men. In one scene a bodybuilder punches her in the face simply for reacting badly when he calls her friend a slur and puts his hands on Jack without permission.
The performances are really good. Franco does a grand job of playing a man who’s slime in human form, while Stewart conveys aching fragility and survivalism as Lou. Her nervous energy creates a character that plays off well against O’Brian’s equally wounded recluse. The story twists and turns pleasantly and has some moments of surrealistic filmmaking that lend it a magical realist air.
Rating: 3/4
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So I just saw Da Strange Peeps: Chatper Wun, and surprise surprise, it was a colossal mound of turd. Full disclosure: I’m not really the person to review this movie because I hate the Strangers franchise and concept. The first film, written and directed by then-newbie Bryan Bertino in 2008, was in his words loosely based on a series of break-ins in his hometown as well as, of course, the real-life Manson Family murders. But it was just an excuse to tell a story with no story and characters that have no character. The plot was that a couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman), dithering about whether they should marry, spend the night at an isolated cabin when three killers - a man and two women - in babyface masks show up to terrorise them. The central tease comes down to a simple dialogue exchange: “Why are you doing this?” a victim asks. “Because you were home” one of the killers replies.
This was supposedly enough to make everyone in the naughty ‘00s fill their pantaloons. (One hilarious bit of contemporary marketing sees an interviewer try to convince Tyler and Speedman that he needed to call friends for moral support once the film was over, but then the bit goes too far and it seems like they’re discouraging people from spending their money on the product, so Speedman suddenly panics and starts backtracking.) Here’s the thing, though: while plenty of scary killers on the big screen have had “no motive”, they have had context. Michael Myers of Halloween (1978) didn’t have a reason to kill, however, we know that he was a little boy who killed his big sister and then after many years of being institutionalised escaped to stalk other young women.
By contrast, what do we know about the Strangers? That they don’t have a motive. Also, they wear masks, two porcelain Betty Boop-type things for the women, sackcloth like Jason’s mask in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) for the guy. Also, they engage in obnoxious cat-and-mouse games that seem to be more for the audience than the characters and frequently make them seem supernatural, which they’re not, so… plot hole.
The details that Bertino did add to the original film seem to contradict each other as well. The Strangers say that they’re attacking the couple because they happened to be home, implying that they’re thrill killers. Later, however, they say to each other that next time it’ll be “easier”, implying that their motive is pathological or maybe even spiritual. Making them reluctant killers. So which is it? Who knows? Certainly not Bryan Bertino.
The franchise represents one of the laziest approaches to horror, where you’re not even telling a story, just presenting some basic elements with the least development possible. I guess I do sort of admire Bertino’s chutzpah in making millions from a screenplay that anyone could write. The romance writer Jacqueline Susann wrote her first drafts on yellow paper, before adding motive and character to successive drafts on different-coloured paper. The Strangers feels like it was only ever written on yellow paper.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is really just a loose remake of the original, to a point where all of the same beats are there, so by reviewing the 2008 film I’ve pretty much covered this one as well. Though it markets itself as a prequel in the title and promises to show you how the Strangers “began”, it’s clearly a rehash intended to capitalise off David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboots (two more “chapters” are planned; hopefully they go the way of Green’s plans for sequels to his terrible Exorcist film). Renny Harlin directs in his hackiest “paycheck, please” mode, while two writers without Wikipedia pages are credited with the “screenplay”, which I put in quotation marks because it’s hardly their work.
The only real difference is that this time the film adds some elements that hint at an actual story and motivations. Here there’s a prologue where a guy who we later find out was a wanted criminal is chased by the Strangers. After that, we see an honestly kind of offensive bit of text about how many violent crimes happen in America (as if the non-events of this movie resemble real tragedy in any way).
Following this, the Tyler and Speedman stand-ins Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) arrive “somewhere in Oregon”, where locals treat them with vague hostility before directing them to an Airbnb for the night while some greasy rednecks fix their car. Cue a lot of nothing until the Strangers show up, at which point we see a lot more nothing, but with running and mild violence. (This is the tamest 15-rated horror film I’ve seen in a while.)
The added story stuff is reminiscent of something like The Woods Are Dark by Richard Laymon, a 1981 novel about a rural California town that’s in league with a cannibal race to whom they feed tourists. Harlin doesn’t bother to expand on anything, however. Presumably, he’s saving the actual plot for the sequels, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t, since this franchise has already spun three films out of absolutely nothing.
Rating: 0.5/4
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