Having a premiere at SXSW last year turned out to be a charm for directing duo The Daniels, and although awards lightning most likely won’t strike this year for this somewhat niche horror pastiche, hopefully its creators — Australian double-act the Cairnes brothers — will get their own media moment as a result. That Late Night With the Devil is one for the myriad genre festivals that abound internationally is a no-brainer, but the Cairneses deserve a bit more consideration than that for their film’s wry engagement with U.S. history and pop culture, despite shooting their New York-set film entirely in Melbourne.
While the premise is quite simple, there’s an awful lot to get through before we ever get to that. Most of it could be seen as superfluous — a montage of early ’70s newsreel clips gives us images of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, the Manson trial and (jumping the gun a bit) David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz” — but they do set the scene: this is the America of The Ice Storm, a country about to be terrified by The Exorcist and mollified by the far, far away galaxy of Star Wars. Into this between-time walks Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a radio announcer from Chicago who starts the five-nightly chat show Night Owls in April 1971 and instantly becomes a success, second only to Johnny Carson.
Disclaimer: This story is generated from RSS Feed and has not been created or edited by Waba News. Publisher: Deadline