LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL ★★★★
(MA) 92 minutes

Late Night with the Devil is pitched at both horror movie addicts and nostalgia buffs with a taste for old television formats. It’s an unlikely marriage, yet somehow the film’s Australian writer-directors, Colin and Cameron Cairnes, make it work by applying a healthy dose of raw satire.

In explaining their inspirations, they hark back to their childhood fondness for Don Lane, the lanky American who dominated the Australian chat show in the mid-’70s and early ’80s. It was Lane’s interest in interviewing clairvoyants and other devotees of the supernatural that endeared him to the brothers, who were already passionate fright-fest fans. And it’s paid off. The film has become a low-budget box-office hit in the US.

It’s set in 1977 and Halloween is rolling around just as Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), host of Night Owls, a Chicago talk show, is getting desperate. His ratings have been on the slide since the breakdown he suffered after the untimely death of his wife, and they’re showing no sign of recovery.

As a result, he’s counting on Halloween to give him the boost he needs. Deciding to go for shock value, he’s booked a psychic, a professional sceptic, a parapsychologist and her patient – a teenager said to be possessed by the devil. Then, quite justifiably, he hopes for fireworks.

Naturally, the script features assorted borrowings from The Exorcist. They were inevitable. More original is the film’s shooting style, which successfully recreates the look and atmosphere of a 1970s television studio. The Cairnes used three pedestal cameras, lit the set with lamps of the period and brought in a group of jazz musicians to perform as a “house band”, and memory does the rest.

The cast is Australian except for Dastmalchian. A familiar face from a series of superhero movies, he has a volatile charm that evaporates rapidly once the action accelerates and the guests start doing battle – although Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the teenager at the centre of the storm, remains remarkably composed during the intervals in which the devil isn’t actually in possession. Told about her performance when under his spell, she says, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” sounding like a well-mannered private schoolgirl who’s stepped on somebody’s toe.

The main villain, apart from Lucifer, is the sceptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a pompous know-it-all who’s out to nag everybody into agreeing with him. And the most sympathetic is Delroy’s foil Gus (Rhys Auteri), who abandons his role as the show’s jolly fat man once things begin to heat up, then tries to inject a little good sense and decency into proceedings. But it’s much too late.