By David Dent
Australian directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes’s last movie was the fun, gory Scare Campaign (2016) which, like LNwtD, pastiched a popular TV format. Eight years later they’re back, but nothing can prepare you for what they’ve dished up here.
David Dastmalchian is Jack Delroy, a talk show presenter in 1970s USA, whose ratings have him constantly chasing the coat tails of the more successful Johnny Carson. After a personal tragedy involving the early death of his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) to cancer – she even appears on his show, in the latter stages of the disease, a move which is surely aimed at upping audience views – he fades from the limelight.
But he returns, hungrier for success than ever, and prepared to go to any length to secure those ratings; there’s a hint from his backstory that he might be ‘assisted’ in these ambitions. For his 1977 Halloween show, the spooky lineup includes Christou, a dodgy celebrity psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), Carmichael Haig, a former celebrity psychic turned debunker (Ian Bliss) and the star attractions, writer and researcher Laura Gordon (June-Ross Mitchell) and her latest project, a young girl called Lily (Ingrid Torelli), lone survivor of a mass suicide cult, now apparently possessed by a demon – possibly even the devil – who she calls ‘Mr Wiggles’. And as if that isn’t enough, as part of the show Delroy wants to broadcast, live, the summoning of the demon hiding inside Lily.
What happens during the broadcast owes more than a little to BBC’s Ghostwatch, from 1992, but it’s an affectionate and not overly derivative nod, which style wise also takes in the camp, knowing horror novels of Grady Hendrix. The sceptic has their doubts challenged, the fake psychic gets put through his paces, and ‘Mr Wiggles’ certainly comes out to play. But LNwtD cleverly envelopes all those elements in its careful construction of an authentic TV broadcast from the 1970s; the on point VT feel, participative live band and Delroy’s studio stooge Gus (Rhys Auteri) are note perfect, and the frequent ad breaks are a clever device to provide behind the scenes footage as Delroy struggles to hold the show together. There’s also some nice DePalmaesque split screen work.
But throughout the whole thing, Dastmalchian excels as the troubled talk show host; he pretty much carries the first third of the film and is captivating in his mix of ambition and naivety. “The people have spoken” he says at one point, as the dumb audience egg him on to new terrors. This is clever, brilliantly entertaining filmmaking; one of my films of the year, and it’s only March.
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