
I fell in to a burning ring of fire. Went down down down
and the ratings went higher
dirs.: Colin & Cameron Cairnes
2024
This is a surprisingly accomplished film, especially for one made in Melbourne. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie made in Melbourne. Love and other Catastrophes? Chopper? The Book of Revelation?
Fortunately or not, none of ‘Melbourne’ or Naarm factors into the story because it’s set in America in the 1970s, and mostly all transpires in or around a tv studio where a “Tonight” type program is being filmed.
The lead in this is Jack, played by David Dastmalchian, who has often played weirdos or psychos or a combination of both, but here plays the charismatic host of a late night program that is suffering in the ratings and doesn’t look like it’s going to survive. Even if you haven’t watched a tonight show lately, or in the last ten years, or even longer, the format hasn’t changed. There’s a host, there’s a sidekick, there’s a band, and there’s a studio audience made up of clapping seals who applaud and laugh whenever a sign lights up telling them to laugh like the mindless automatons that they are.
There’s musical guests, there’s people with animals, there’s probably movie stars and comedians and, I dunno, local celebrities, and it all transpires under the studio’s bright lights and beige / burnt orange / brown set designs.
But since the ratings for his show, which used to threaten Jimmy Carson, but now are scraping the bottom of the barrel, are terrible, he’s desperate for something to change his loser narrative.
Hence, the occult. The show goes to extreme lengths to court controversy, and there’s nothing more controversial, for the time period, than bringing on a teenage girl who says she’s possessed by a devil.
Not The Devil, mind you, but some other low-ranking shmuck who can still do the scary voices and the rotating head thing.
The ethics of bringing out a clearly mentally ill teenager and putting her in front of a national audience, well, let’s remember the time period. Sexual harassment was mandatory, everyone was smoking, even babies in the womb, and no one ever drank water, only spirits, all of the time, apparently.
The show itself has a resident magician turned sceptic (Ian Bliss), but also a psychic who still pretends it’s all real called Christou (Fayssal Bazzi). He does the cold reading “is there a Peter, a Penelope, a Patrick in the room? Yes? How wicked. Did you ever have a mother? Really? And was her name Ameelia no Anne Marie no Judith? Julie? Yes of course Julia. She’s in the room with us now, anything you’d like to tell her?” bullshit that we all know and love.
All that kind of bullshit has receded a bit, I think, not because people have become less gullible, oh fuck no, but because people don’t seem to think spirits or demons are messing with their lives as much anymore.
These days they attribute that kind of manipulation to vaccines, chemicals in the water and in the vapour trails of airplanes, and Bill Gates’s microchips.
If anything, yeah, we’re getting dumber as a species, that should be obvious.
But back then people were obsessed with cults and the supernatural I guess(?) My reference point, and I guess it might be for the filmmakers as well, at least in Australia was stuff like The Don Lane Show, which would have jerks like the spoon bender Uri Geller on, but often had the famous American sceptic James Randi who would debunk anything and everything that he could, and had a cheque for a million dollars that he’d give to anyone who could do something genuinely supernatural that wasn’t a parlour trick.
It may shock you that there’s a guy in this film with a cheque he threatens to give anyone who can do something genuinely supernatural.
And then something supernatural happens. No cheque for you.
I feel like the film is the strongest before everything goes haywire. There’s something else going on in the background which I’m not even going to mention, not because it’s spoilers, but because I didn’t care. It’s the way they capture Jack’s sweaty desperation even as he’s trying to charm his way through increasingly bizarre circumstances. When everyone around you is telling you you’ve gone too far, it’s usually a good sign that things are very fucked up, but it’s funny how much further they end up going for the nebulous possibility of ratings.
That’s why I feel like the strongest parts of the movie have nothing to do with the supernatural, which is a funny thing to say about what is essentially meant to be a horror flick.
I didn’t find it even the least bit scary. That stuff wasn’t scary at all. There’s practically no genuine horror until close to the last half hour of the movie, but I didn’t mind at all. I didn’t sign up for jump scares and such – I was curious to see how much further a guy who’s already sold his soul is prepared to go.
Seeing as they’re playing the “found footage” game with this flick, the conceit being that we’re watching the long lost tapes of what was filmed on that fateful night so many years ago, it mostly works while its focussed on the actual show, and the behind the scenes aspects of running the show. When it clearly has footage of stuff there would be no reason for a camera to have been filming way back then in the 1970s, well, it kinda falls apart, almost as badly as the ending.
I don’t feel it’s that strong an ending. In fact, yeah I thought it was pretty dumb. It’s not that it’s nonsensical, I mean, if you were going to end things in such a definitive way, one which thankfully also means a sequel will be very unlikely, you could have done worse. But you could also have done better.
Performance-wise Dastmalchian does fantastically carrying the film until its inevitable conclusion. I also thought Ian Bliss as the increasingly irritated sceptic does a seriously good job. I’ve seen him in so many Australian productions, but he’s not a household name. Probably his most memorable performance, or at least most well-known internationally would be in the Matrix sequels where he had the singular honour of playing a guy taken over by the demonic Agent Smith, which meant Bliss had to play Hugo Weaving playing Agent Smith. With that accent and all.
Here he’s all class, and all knowing, and all wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. But it’s a great performance.
I also liked the guy who played Jack’s sidekick, being Rhys Auteri, who plays Gus. Gus is very much like Jeffrey Tambor playing Hank from The Larry Sanders Show. Being a sidekick, no-one listens to him when he expresses his moral or religious concerns, and then at the end of the film, when he tries to do the whole “The Power of Christ Compels You!” bit, he really, really pays the price for it, and so he should.
This is not a flick where the devil can be bargained with, or repelled, or contained, or banished. This is a flick where the devil has the power to infect people’s hearts and minds because they will all do anything to be famous, and the best way to do that in the 1970s is through television.
Ah, an ode to a simpler time. If this flick was set today, its prey would be influencers, and its perpetrators would be brand ambassadors.
Tremble in the face of such evil.
7 times I really wish this had a better ending, but the journey there is still pretty compelling out of 10
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“Please stay tuned for a live television first as we attempt to commune with the Devil” – and we’ll be right back, after a word from our sponsors - Late Night With the Devil
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