Late Night With The Devil

Late Night with The Devil

Writers and Directors ~ Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes

2023, Australia - United Arab Emirates

Stars ~ David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss

 

With this kind of horror premise, there’s only one likely way it will go. And it does, so it is the journey and the execution that counts. Instead of the trending Eighties homage, Cameron and Colin Cairnes go to the Seventies for an era of talk show TV and Satanism. There’s plenty of Seventies aesthetic but played straight instead of kitsch; although it becomes evident quickly that the live and “backstage footage” doesn’t hold up, being too evidently clear and edited for maximum effect to be convincing. And then there’s the disappointment/outrage at AI usage for the transition cards, which at the very least seems lazy. Long before the denouement, the film has jettisoned and kind of “found footage” credulity pinned by the opening narration (Michael Ironside!) summarising a tumultuous decade and the never-quite-making-it career of our central show host. It becomes apparent that any demand for sincerity or continuity as found footage is shrugged off whenever it needs to, even before and especially when we get to the worms. ‘Ghostwatch’ it isn’t. It sets up and then breaks its own rules. If you can’t make allowances for such shrugs, enjoyment will be crimped.

 

 

But what it does have is pleasureable period detail, a little satire on backstage melodrama and fame,‘The Exorcist’ and theremin gags and, mostly, David Dastmalchian. Dastmalchian manages to convey subtlety in a role that could have been just showboating and/or obnoxious in a context where he is always on show. When someone says he’s a good guy, it’s easy to believe that he is misguided rather than egotistic. Everyone projects layers of real characters underneath the televised veneer, even hammy clairvoyant Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), for a broad-strokes producer, Josh Quong Tart (Leo Fiskewhen); and we get to the apparently possessed girl, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), she’s obviously doing the Creepy Kid thing from the outset, talking like someone half her age, that there is nowhere for her to go. It all escalates into a few shocks and reality breakdown which jettison once and for all the TV format pretence.

 

It's true that this has mostly been heavily guided by gripes about internal logic, but with ‘100 Bloody Acres’, the Cairnes brothers made it clear they are out to offer fun and extremity in equal measure, and there’s plenty in ‘Late Night with the Devil’ so that any shortcomings don’t stop the enjoyment. They know how to serve up a most entertaining horror concoction.

 

 

 

GRIMMFEST digital 2021: 'Slapface', 'The Night Belongs to Monsters', 'For Roger', 'Father of Flies', 'Happy Times'

GRIMFEST digital 2021

 

SLAPFACE

Writer & Director: Jeremiah Kipp

2021, USA

Cast – August Maturo, Mike Manning, Libe Barer, Mirabelle Lee, Dan Hedaya

 

Kipp frontloads his film about abandoned, simmering youth with the game of “slapface”, where the two orphaned brothers slap each other’s faces to vent pent up anger. Domestic abuse and bullying are the themes – underlined by end text – where the older brother Tom (Manning) is ill equipped to deal with bringing up his slightly wayward younger brother, Lucus (Maturo). Lucus is friendless and bullied by three girls, one of whom he carries out a clandestine friendship of sorts and flirtation, but things take a turn when he befriends a witch he discovers in an abandoned Gothic building. The witch is deliberately the kind found in old fairy tales, but is here a manifestation of his latent disturbance and violence, and by being mostly kept as a looming shadow, is properly eerie.

 

In fact, the whole tone is a mixture of the consistently eerie and the dejected realism of, say, ‘River’s Edge’, or the second half of ‘Ham on Rye’. It’s not quite the supernatural unleashing the child’s psychopathic side, as with an example like ‘The Pit’, for Lucus is just a troubled, misunderstood kid and the witch – which he seems to have summoned as an unforgiving feminine force – becomes a loose cannon protective monster for him. Maturo puts in an excellent performance, by turns dejected, feisty, frustrated and sad.

 

And in scenarios like this, we’re often left taking the blame for the monsters we have unleashed or have affinity for. As with all the best horror-bildungsroman, it conjures a troubling emotional charge.

 

The Night Belong to Monsters

Director – Sebastian Perillo

Screenwriter – Paula Marotta

2021, Argentina

Cast – Lu Grasso, Esteban Lamothe, Jazmín Stuart, Gustavo Garzón, Agustin Daulte, Macarena Suárez

 

Again, set in a downbeat world of a troubled teen. Sol is uprooted from her beloved Grandma’s to live with her mother’s new lover, who mum can’t stop pawing. Bullied and friendless, vulnerable in a new bedroom where the door doesn’t close, Sol saves a trapped white dog with seemingly preternatural abilities, telepathically bonding with it so that it becomes her violent defender.

 

Again, centred in a strong young performance from Lu Grasso, Perillo’s film is low key and mostly nocturnal, its vibe moody and downcast. It suggests a bond between violence and sex, primal reactions to adolescent angst, etc, but it never quite has the poignancy promised by its title. Ultimately, it leaves Sol codling her violent manifestations, a happy ending. Miserablist coming-of-age with a supernatural uplift.

 

 

For Roger

Director - Aaron Bartuska

Screenwriter – Aaron Bartuska, Gwyn Cutler, Derek Pinchot

2021, USA

 

Cabin in the woods; a masked assailant: yes, it’s low-budget homemade horror time. It takes close to an hour before things kick in, otherwise it’s Roger watching home videos of being a passive-aggressive dick to his late girlfriend. A slow burn isn’t an issue, but there is the sense that nine out of ten shots last too long. In the end, despite sparks of insight into gaslighting and the “My Life On Film!” generation, the home invasion horror gives way to Roger’s self-pity.

 

 

Father of Flies

Director – Ben Charles Edwards

Screenwriters - Ben Charles Edwards, Nadia Doherty

Cast - Nicholas Tucci, Camilla Rutherford, Davi Santos, Sandra Andreis, Page Ruth

 

Comes across as a wicked witch/stepmother tale. It’s perpetual oddness and conflict between naturalism and affection, even a hint of giallo, and the ever popping-up threat of a cheaper horror of ‘The Conjuring’ variety make for an odd concoction. Again, another film grounded in a notable young performance from Keaton Ketlow as the boy through whose perspective this is mostly filtered. Camilla Rutherford plays up the English Oddball Stepmother That Must Not Be Trusted for all its worth (the massage mask signals her otherworldliness and untrustworthiness to the max).

 

For a while, this oddness and fairy-tale affectation reminded me of Philip Ridley’s work. Ultimately, it ends up both more satisfying and cruel than maybe predicted.

 

Happy Times

Director – Michael Mayer

Screenwriters – Michael Mayer, Guy Ayal

Cast – Michael Aloni, Iris Bahr, Shani Atias, Liraz Chamami, Alon Pdut, Ido Mor, Mike Burstyn, Daniel Lavid

 

A dinner party that starts out privileged and ordinary enough descends into violent farce via grudges both petty and large, as well as bigotries both quiet and vocal. It’s a class thing with almost everyone a money-making professional – one character laments why they can’t have a party with just “normal” people – so the thin line between the monied and savagery is a given, but it’s also a very pointed criticism of Israeli machismo, stubbornness, misogyny and prejudices. It's this that is most provocative, but it’s a satire that knows what it’s doing: no one is spared when the violence and grudges start and there’s only one way it can end. And watch how a character knows how to spin prejudice and accusations of prejudice to get rid of the police.

 

Not so broad it becomes wanton slapstick, it keeps its eye on the allegory, is well performed, escalating organically from insolences and pettiness already in place. And it’s funny.

 

**

 

In the Q&A for ‘Slapface’, director Jeremiah Kipp spoke of how horror is an ideal genre for dealing with domestic horror just by throwing in a monster of some sort, and all these films adhere and prove that. ‘Happy Times’ has no supernatural element, but the violence and gore belong to the horror genre (the horror being their prejudice, privilege, etc). The use of the genre in all these films lay bare  the dysfunctions and disturbances in a way otherwise not possible, resulting in emotional content and affect not reachable otherwise.

The Pyramid

Grégory Levasseur, 2014, USA

Another hand-held footage excursion into hell, except for when it’s not hand-held. All the tedious motifs of found footage aesthetic are here (always exposition; why are they still filming? Etc.) but there are no characters that reach more than two-dimensions to enliven things. In fact, they are stupid (what’s the point of it all if they think the air is poisonous and yet still take off their masks?). Director Grégory Levasseur and producer Alexandre Aja have been responsible for some interesting nasty stuff – ‘The Hill Have Eyes’ remake, ‘Haut Tension’ and (my favourite) the ‘Maniac’ remake – but this isn’t one of them; this falls more into their sillier pile along with ‘Piranha 3D’. Bringing Egyptian monsters to life could have been interesting if it all wasn’t so dull, and ultimately the monster looks like dodgy claymation, and not in a fun way.

One moment in: 'Exists'

Exists

Eduardo Sanchez, 2014, USA

‘Exists’ is a pretty average monster horror. It suffers, as these things tend to do, from unremarkable and frequently annoying twentysomething characters, the kind you can’t particularly be too concerned with. It’s also a shakycam p.o.v. “found footage” film, with all the weaknesses that brings with it. However, it is a bigfoot film and it’s here it wins. When the p.o.v. aesthetic works, its effective to giving in an “insiders” view of horror moments we are familiar with: I’m thinking of the monster’s p.o.v. when they fly off in ‘V/H/S/’ and ‘Jaruzalem’, or the ending of ‘The Borderlands’. In ‘Exists’, there are effective shots of the sasquatch running through the woods to catch up with a victim cycling away, but better than that, and the one shot that means this film will always overcome its weaknesses with me, is that phenomenal, convincing, elongated close-up of the beast at the end. I always thought that Chewbacca was probably the most convincing alien in ‘Star Wars’ and, here, such a convincing man-in-a-suit design creates something truly scary and magnificent in the monster pantheon. All the way through the film, I wondered if we would ever get to actually see, properly, the monster. I mean, it wouldn’t necessarily matter – after all, ‘Willow Creek’ scared me and is probably my favourite Sasquatch film despite the absence of bigfoot sightings – but then when the bigfoot got his close-up, and sustained it, I was mesmerised. Many sasquatch films have kept the beast at arm’s-length, because after all it is just a man in a monster suit and it’s best not to reveal its shortcomings too much, and anyway things are better with a little mystery. But this monster-mask is convincing, scary and is thoroughly able of absorbing scrutiny.