KinoTopia 066: Late Night with the Devil (Cameron & Colin Cairnes, 2023)
Ted B. has some words on LNwtD
Late Night with the Devil
Cameron & Colin Cairnes, 2023
DCP courtesy: Umbrella
Rating: MA15+
Words by Ted Banova
My favourite piece of semi-spurious, vulgar, though nonetheless compelling societal meta-analysis is the Lead-Crime Hypothesis. It posits that the introduction of tetraethyllead as an additive in motor fuel in the 1920s (to limit wear on exhaust valves) had a direct correlation to a consistent, global rise in violent crime through the course of the 20th century. Short term, lead is bad for anyone (especially children) and can cause myriad neurological issues no matter the amount of exposure or duration. Longer term, in an environment of consistent exposure (especially for children) lead will without question cause an increase in impulsive actions and social aggression.
But Lead! You were our favourite! Our main squeeze! Our Ol’ Reliable! You’re plentiful, soft, and malleable with an incredibly low melting point. Who cares if some stuffed-shirt poindexter said you’re a neurotoxin that accumulates in my soft tissue and bones. That’s what I love about you, baby! You’re persistent, you’re tenacious, and you’re always there!
Or so we would tell ourselves, disbelieving of the half stuttered yammerings from the fuckless nerds in the medical research community. Unfortunately, the prevalence of leaded petrol emissions (as well as residual lead from those settled emissions, eroding lead pipes used widely in municipal plumbing, particles from flaking lead paint in houses, lead pencils, lead-acid batteries, etc.) was by the late 60’s and early 70’s probably shown to be making sweet little Billy and Suzie into maladapted, homicidal, antisocial maniacs. It’s a hypothesis so conveniently dismissive of material analysis that you can retroactively apply it to any hiccup in history. There’s a corner of Roman historiography that suggests the use of lead in aqueducts, in the glazing of pottery and the preservation of wines, may have led to a gradual, generational mental degradation in the Patrician upper-crust of Roman society, and their supposed degeneracy and eventual downfall. (Siri, who were the Gracchi?)
But back in the 7th decade of the 20th century AD; cults, serial killers, homicidal escalation in mundane robberies, the whole nine yards could also maybe, hypothetically, potentially be an indirect cause of Mother Earth’s most readily available neurotoxin being glugged out straight into the great wide everywhere for half a century. The peoples of that generation still retain a substantial portion of political control. What ya gonna do? (Don’t think about Rome.)
I could show you facts and figures and attempt to outline the grand silhouette of the neurotoxicological horror that was oopsie’d upon an unsuspecting public, but I’m here to talk about movies. So in lieu of that I’ll just state that when the global west legislated against leaded petrol (only as much as the neo-liberal machine could bear) the violent crime statistics, compliant nation by compliant nation, immediately started trending downwards.
Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) rocking out
But in light of me being here to discuss my beloved Kino, I’m forced to ask, what did lead exposure give us?
Quite a lot I reckon. The failure of the big studios, the dissolution of the censorial Hays Code in 1968, and the advent of the permissibly counter-cultural New Hollywood of the late 60’s, was the perfect melting pot for the lead-affected young guns of the film school generation, as well as your average drive-in theatre smut peddlers, to really have a swing at what made their stunted little brains tick:
The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween showed us with scummy, grainy, tinny-sounding clarity that violence is but a tenebrous moment from slicing through the thinly papered tapestry of the new American myth.
The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and Carrie were here to say that the sanctity of the feminine, and its proximity in the American nuclear family, was in fact something deeply satanic and volatile. They showed us slick blood, screaming youths, and the grotesque dilapidation of the American body politic. Violence beyond reckoning wasn’t to be found in Balkan castles or long buried tombs anymore; they were in quaint, weatherboard houses, avenued suburbias and upper-east-side apartments. Your son wanted to kill you these past 18 years, but thankfully you sent him to UC Berkeley and he made this instead, consider yourself lucky.
My point is that there is a grime, a residue, a film (pardon me) that permeates the horror of this era. It speaks to a nascent awareness of the ideological sickness that permeated 1970’s Western society that could only result from an intimate and persistent congress with a base element of the chemical divine; maybe also a knee-jerk response to the televised violence of the War of American Aggression in Vietnam, or an aftershock of the failed attempts at leftism that spasmed then dribbled out in the late 60’s, alongside perhaps a response to the corrupt, facile, and neutered presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.
But chiefly it’s the lead. Don’t forget the lead.
There was a tactile, tangible nihilism in these films that you can still feel today. It coats the viewer like lead-petrol particles over an open Lone Ranger lunch-box. It’s a twinge that is difficult to find in the contemporaneous, marketised smart-guy horror of the current era, so fixated on narratological societal allegory that it misses the potency that we once knew so well within viscera and the grotesque (excepting Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022)).
I would dread if the expectation ever fell to me to accurately evoke that era. Thankfully it fell to two other blokes from Melbourne and they called it “Late Night with the Devil”; an entertaining film that fails to extend itself beyond pastiche.
Set on Halloween night of 1977, we’re presented the found footage of the final episode of “Night Owls with Jack Delroy”. Preambled by an expositional powerpoint presentation narrated by the gravelly voiced Michael Ironsides, it’s story follows the aforementioned Jack, a lower-rated contemporary of Late Night’s Johnny Carson, as he attempts a bombastic, gimmicky Halloween special to drag himself out of the threat of cancellation. Jack’s ratings woes, as exposited in Ironside’s narration, are informed by the illness and death of his dearly beloved wife Madeleine. Rearing to shoot his way back up the Nielsen ratings, Jack has constructed a network TV spooktacular to draw the American public back in. A psychic, a former-hypnotist-turned-professional-skeptic, and a supposedly possessed young woman and her psychologist/legal guardian fill out the line up, the last of which promises to provide an interview with the devil himself. Needless to say, Jack’s shot at the big time goes badly in a supernaturally catastrophic way.
The film takes its time in setting up the diegesis of it’s found footage presentation, contained within the hour or so that it takes to film Jack’s program, the first 40 or so minutes post-Ironside narration playing out as if nothing is amiss. The first guest might just be a fake, the following skeptic disproves him in his interview, but maybe the skeptic is proven wrong after the next ad break. It attempts to strike a balance within the containment of it’s talk-show bottle narrative, aiming to draw the viewer into believing and then falling back into skepticism. It’s a wobbly tightrope walk thats pulled off just adequately. In between the ad breaks it moves to a black and white pseudo-documentary style as the cast chomp cigarettes and expose more of the personal stakes behind this episode. It all transpires exactly as you’d expect it to, and by the time we arrive at the interview with the stereotypical creepy little girl possessed by one of Hell’s lower demons we pretty much know what we’re in for; cults, demons, blood and guts.
I can’t say that the film is scary, but it is sufficiently entertaining. The performances, especially David Dalstmachian’s Jack Delroy, are solid across the board, though the short time frame that the story has to play out in means there isn’t much room for growth or development (barring a late game revelation regarding the talk shows origins). The sets and make-up give a level of authenticity, however the visual and special effects, both practical and digital, leave a bit to be desired; Plug-in blood pops, a CGI black bile that looks pretty hokey, a puppeteered worm that reads far more silly than scary (I believe an unfortunate side-effect of the story requiring a persistent, inadvertently comedic mid-shot). Though much of the film is presented in a slightly grainy 4:3 aspect ratio, only switching to 16:9 during the previously mentioned black and white pseudo-doco moments, it feels like more could’ve been done, turning up that Cathode Ray grain and distortion even 20% more could’ve gone a long way. Furthermore, the much discussed use of AI art generators for the “We’ll be right back” ad-break interstitials, while not particularly noticeable if you’re not looking for it does leave a bad taste in your mouth.
As a result, the whole thing reads a bit too clean, a bit too sanitized, like it was tailor made for an audience of True-Crime podcast listeners with spooky satanic leg tattoos. It lacks a little something, and I think that something is lead. If you’re going to show me a period piece set in the era where your chosen genre was at its best, then you’ve gotta crank up that diesel engine. I enjoyed this movie plenty, but yearned for more of the gritty, grainy, and grotesque that I
associate with the oldies it’s evoking. If the film couldn’t scare me then I wanted to at least be made to feel unsettled or revolted.
Thinking back on Roman society and their exposure to lead I couldn’t help but reach for a solution to this issue, not just for horror period pieces but for the genre as a whole. Those Roman’s seemed to adore lead, but also caste systems and devotional sects; for the betterment of the horror genre I propose creating a cloistered sub-class of horror writers, like a monkhood or the Vestal Virgins. Have already maladapted, gangly nerds randomly chosen at a young age and placed in an either subterranean catacomb or storm-swept mountaintop environment that’s rife with low-levels of lead. Perhaps making lead inhalation a kind of ritualistic act or putting it into the thin gruel they would be served. Give them about 20 years then stuff them in a room with a word processor and see if they can’t churn out another Carrie, or hell, by then maybe Late Night with the Devil would be due the remake treatment.
WEEKLY FILM LISTINGS
May 23 - May 29
ACMI
It Is Night in America (É Noite na América)
Ana Vaz, 2022
Screening Friday
Two Ways: The Kimberley Rock Art Legacy
Mark Jones, 2024
Screening Wednesday
Cannes Competitors
Winter Boy
Christophe Honoré, 2022
Screening Saturday
Paris, 13th District
Jacques Audiard, 2021
Screening Saturday
A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia, 2021
Screening Sunday
Cow
Andrea Arnold, 2021
Screening Monday
Holy Spider
Ali Abbasi, 2022
Screening Tuesday
Matinees
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023
Screening Fri - Sun
New Voices in Australian Cinema
Things Will Be Different
Lucie McMahon, 2023
Screening Tuesday
AFW + NFSA #65: A Life Well Spent: shorts by Les Blank at the Brunswick Green from 7:30pm
Gap-Toothed Women (Les Blank, 1987)
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (Les Blank, 1979)
Dry Wood (Les Blank, 1973)
Tomato Day (Madeleine Martiniello, 2017)
German Film Festival - Tix Here
Civil War
Alex Garland, 2024
+
Men
Alex Garland, 2022
Screening Thursday @ 7pm
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Eleanor Coppola, 1991
Screening Saturday @ 4pm
Ghostbust-a-Thon
Various directors
Screening Sunday 1pm
Monkey Man
Dev Patel, 2024
+
Repo Man
Alex Cox, 1984
Screening Wednesday
BBBC CINEMA (GALLERYGALLERY BRUNSWICK)
Coming soon (May / June)
No screening this week
CHINATOWN CINEMA
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Wes Ball, 2024
Screening Daily
I Love You, to the Moon, and Back
Wei-Jan Liu, 2024
Screening Wednesday
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
Soi Cheang, 2024
Screening Daily
Three Old Boys
Qunshu Gao, 2024
Screening Daily
CINÉ-CLUB (Carlton)
Closed for winter
Silkwood
Mike Nichols, 1983
Screening Saturday 6:30pm
Preview
The Beast
Bertrand Bonello, 2023
Screening Friday 6:10pm
New Release
Radical
Christopher Zalla, 2023
Screening Thursday
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller, 2024
Screening Daily
A Great Friend
Eric Besnard, 2023
Screening Daily
General Release
The Way, My Way
Bill Bennett, 2024
Screening Daily
The Three Musketeers: D'artagnan
Martin Bourboulon, 2023
Screening Daily
Housekeeping for Beginners
Goran Stolevski, 2023
Screening daily
Monster
Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023
Screening daily
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
Neo Sora, 2023
Weekend Screenings
Fremont
Babak Jalali, 2023
Screening Daily
The Taste of Things
Tran Anh Hung, 2023
Screening Daily
The Teacher’s Lounge
Ilker Çatak, 2023
Screening Daily
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino, 2024
Screening Daily
Freud’s Last Session
Matt Brown, 2023
Screening Daily
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023
Screening Daily
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher, 2023
Screening Daily
DOGMILK DEGUSTATIONS: @ Miscellania
Expanded Cinema II
Tidelines
Feat. Bridget Chappell (@hextape.wav ), dancers Anika Deruyter (@anikaderuyter ) and Eloise Wright (@e.l.o____ ), video artist Sofie McClure (@sofiemcclure )
+
Continuity Loop
Audio visual performance by filmmaker Jordan James Kaye (@jordanjameskaye ) and musician Levi Liauw (@levi_liauw )
Doors 6:30pm for a 7:30pm start
Check the Facebook - Mahmoud’s Hall (Artswest) is currently occupied.
GAY24 (Bar Flippy’s)
Lady
Ira Sachs, 1993
+
Black Lizard
Kinji Fukasaku, 1968
Screening Wednesday 29 May 7:30pm
HITLIST (9 Gertrude St, Fitzroy)
Shut for now
New Release
Radical
Christopher Zalla, 2023
Screening Thursday
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller, 2024
Screening Daily
General Release
The Way, My Way
Bill Bennett, 2024
Screening Daily
Housekeeping for Beginners
Goran Stolevski, 2023
Screening daily
Golda
Guy Nattiv, 2023
Screening Daily
Monster
Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023
Screening daily
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
Neo Sora, 2023
Weekend Screenings
Fremont
Babak Jalali, 2023
Screening Daily
The Taste of Things
Tran Anh Hung, 2023
Screening Daily
The Teacher’s Lounge
Ilker Çatak, 2023
Screening Daily
Spy X Family Code White
Takashi Katagiri, 2024
Screening daily
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino, 2024
Screening Daily
Freud’s Last Session
Matt Brown, 2023
Screening Daily
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023
Screening Daily
Late Night with the Devil
Cairnes Brothers’, 2023
Screening Daily
Civil War
Alex Garland, 2023
Screening Daily
OVA CLUB
No screening this week
THE MELBOURNE CINÉMATHÈQUE (ACMI)
Writing with Her Eyes: Suso Cecchi D’amico, Screenwriter as Observer
L'innocente (The Innocent)
Luchino Visconti, 1976
+
La signora senza camelie
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953
Screening Wednesday 29 May from 7pm
TOP OF THE HEAP (Tramway Hotel)
No screening this week
No screening this week
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: SCREENING IDEAS
No screening this week
PALACE BALWYN / BRIGHTON / COMO / KINO / PENTRIDGE / MOONEE PONDS / WESTGARTH
German Film Festival - Tickets Here
New Releases
Radical
Christopher Zalla, 2023
Screening Thursday
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller, 2024
Screening Daily
A Great Friend
Eric Besnard, 2023
Screening Daily
General Release
The Way, My Way
Bill Bennett, 2024
Screening Daily
The Three Musketeers: D'artagnan
Martin Bourboulon, 2023
Screening Daily
Housekeeping for Beginners
Goran Stolevski, 2023
Screening daily
Golda
Guy Nattiv, 2023
Screening Daily
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
Neo Sora, 2023
Weekend Screenings
Fremont
Babak Jalali, 2023
Screening Daily
The Taste of Things
Tran Anh Hung, 2023
Screening Daily
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023
Screening Daily
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino, 2024
Screening Daily
Freud’s Last Session
Matt Brown, 2023
Screening Daily
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher, 2023
Screening Daily
Late Night with the Devil
Cairnes Brothers’, 2023
Screening Daily
Civil War
Alex Garland, 2023
Screening Daily
No screening this week
New Releases
Radical
Christopher Zalla, 2023
Screening Thursday
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller, 2024
Screening Daily
General Release
The Way, My Way
Bill Bennett, 2024
Screening Daily
Housekeeping for Beginners
Goran Stolevski, 2023
Screening daily
Golda
Guy Nattiv, 2023
Screening Daily
Monster
Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023
Screening daily
Fremont
Babak Jalali, 2023
Screening Daily
The Taste of Things
Tran Anh Hung, 2023
Screening Daily
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino, 2024
Screening Daily
Freud’s Last Session
Matt Brown, 2023
Screening Daily
Robot Dreams
Pablo Berger, 2023
Screening Daily
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher, 2023
Screening Daily
Late Night with the Devil
Cairnes Brothers’, 2023
Screening Daily
Before Sunset
Richard Linklater, 2004
Screening Thursday
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
George Miller, 2024
Screening Daily
Monster
Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2023
Screening Friday, Saturday and Wed
Desert Hearts
Donna Deitch, 1985
Screening Saturday
The Fall Guy (Final Screening)
David Leitch, 2024
Screening Saturday
Mars Express
Jérémie Périn, 2023
Screening Monday
Challengers (Final Screening)
Luca Guadagnino, 2024
Screening Tuesday
UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ Thornbury Picture House
No screening this week - shut until July