Late Night with the Devil is an empty gimmick in search of a movie. Like every other misbegotten offspring of the 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project, this film, written and directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes, purports to be an unadorned presentation of disturbing old footage that has been has hidden from the public. In this case, the audiovisual relic supposedly unearthed is of a live broadcast that took place on Halloween night of 1977.

Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) host a late night talk show that briefly held promise of unseating the king, Johnny Carson, at the peak of his dominance. Instead, Night Owls with Jack Delroy has taken on a coat of flop sweat as the ratings sag. Riding trends of sensationalized supernatural dread (the book The Amityville Horror would have been published around six weeks before this broadcast), the October 31 episode is stocked with a psychic and medium (Fayssal Bazzi), a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) with a possessed teen (Ingrid Torelli) in tow, and a professional debunker (Ian Bliss) to scoff at it all. A lineup like this is entirely plausible for a struggling talk show airing during the wooly weirdness of the late nineteen-seventies. What’s out of whack is the way the scary stuff proves to be true during the live, coast-to-coast broadcast.

After a tedious preamble, the film largely plays out as if it were simply the recording of that broadcast brought straight to the big screen for modern audiences to marvel at like an urban legend proved real. The Cairnes siblings ably recreate the general look of one of the era’s talk shows without actually coming close to the feel of it. Night Owls with Jack Delroy is alternately leaden or tepid, the kind of show that wouldn’t last six weeks, much less several years with a reputation as a possible giant killer. I have more capacity than most for sitting through vintage talk shows, and my patience failed the test of the movie’s slow build to any action other than cheesy monologue jokes and throws to commercial breaks.

Compounding my irritation, Late Night with the Devil also cheats with its premise. The explanation offered at the beginning of the film notes that backstage footage was also discovered and incorporated into the presentation. Those passages aren’t shot and presented with any commitment to making them look like behind-the-scenes material captured on the fly, especially in that era. It’s more than an aesthetic flaw; the orchestrated sleekness of these scenes undermines the very premise of the film, the maybe-this-did-really-happen illusion that made the original Blair Witch so effective. It smacks of the creative vacancy that runs throughout the project. The filmmakers came up with a hook and lacked the skill or focus to make the resulting film anything more than that.

I made it approximately fifty minutes into Late Night with the Devil. I’m confident it got pretty bonkers after I bailed out, but no amount of escalation was worth the extra time,.

Previously in The Unwatchables…

— Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, directed by Michael Bay
— Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton
— Due Date, directed by Todd Phillips
— Sucker Punch, directed by Zack Snyder
— Cowboys & Aliens, directed by Jon Favreau
— After Earth, directed by M. Night Shyamalan
— The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster
— Now You See Me 2, directed by Jon M. Chu
— The Mummy, directed by Alex Kurtzman
— The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott
— Vice, directed by Adam McKay
— Savages, directed by Oliver Stone
— Welcome to Marwen, directed by Robert Zemeckis
— The Gentlemen, directed by Guy Ritchie
— Reminiscence, directed by Lisa Joy
— Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik