The late night TV wars have been going on for longer than I thought; In the late 70s Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian, a young radio personality from... I want to say Milwaukee? took up arms to run against Johnny Carson with a new show called Night Owls. As you might expect, he was destined to fail - even a very special episode with a very candid interview with his terminally ill wife (Georgina Haig) failed to put him at the top. Two weeks later she was dead and the show went on hiatus... only to return a month later, but it would never recover its previous level of success.
The show went on, going through increasingly desperate stunts for a while until on Halloween night on 1977, Dalton invited a few experts on the supernatural and a very possessed little girl, with disastrous results. Or so Michael Ironside (!) informs us in a voiceover, before he presents us with the original tapes, and some additional footage, of that fateful final show.
What follows is a loving sendup of '70s TV culture wrapped around a ridiculous but clever and effective demonic horror yarn. The show has four guests lined for the night: psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), insufferable smug asshole and paranormal fraud exposer Carmichael Haig (Ian bliss), and the main act - June (Laura Gordon), a paranormal investigator, and her tween ward Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who was rescued from a satanic cult and suffers from sporadic possessions.
Things do not go smoothly. Christou has to... ahem, leave early, Haig is way more belligerent than expected, and June has some serious misgivings (a little too late for that) about exposing sheltered Lilly - not to mention her passenger - to the wider world. There's a cheeky sense of humour (and a whole lot of parody) to the film's portrayal of the TV broadcast, which is a great example of found footage being used effectively; We get both the original show as transmitted, and a bunch of supplemental material as people panic during the commercial breaks. If nothing else, it lets Delroy deliver a very foreboding summary of what's going to happen... followed by a chirpy "...but first a message from our sponsors."
The production design (Otello Storfo) and music (Roscoe James Irwin and Glenn Richards) are spot-on, the wardrobe (Steph Hook) is believable and fun, but writer/directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes biggest scoop is Dastmalchian on the central role; he comes off as very believable as a somewhat sleazy talk show host whose eyes widen when he recognizes good TV is happening, no matter the cost, and also as a more decent than you'd expect human being; There's a version of this script somewhere that's a lot more cynical and way less interesting, so credit the Cairnes brothers for not going in that direction when writing the character. Leaving some humanity in the satire makes it more effective.
The occult elements of the script are well handled, too - no deep cuts, but it's all very cleverly put together, and when things properly go to hell, the payoff is outstanding both in the gruesome and the cool visual ideas department.
Appropriately for the time period, I guess, hypnosis is treated more like a superpower than anything that's ever within sighting distance of plausibility; It does provide for one of the scripts funnier flourishes, though, so that's OK. I was more concerned when the exorcism rites got trotted out, but I shouldn't have worried: this is not a movie that's going to waste your time with a puke and rebuke (thank you My Best Friend's Exorcism). It's got its sights set much higher (or lower, depending on how you look at it) than that.
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