I had heard good things about Late Night with the Devil, and anything I heard did not do justice to this movie. This movie absolutely hit it out of the park and was exceptional in many ways.
For starters, the setting was excellent. For those not old enough to know what seventies and eighties talk shows looked like, this movie was a great replica with its set and the television audience and the overall look and feel of it. Similarly, the cinematography in general was top notch. The formatting of the movie playing out as the real time airing of the show including the behind the scenes footage during commercials was great. The buildup was excellent, starting off with a real light and breezy opening of the episode that made it seem like it was going to be a silly talk show episode, then starting off with a person who could commune with the dead, then bringing on a skeptic to all things supernatural, and finally the girl possessed by a demon and her handler. It was a slow build, and the dread continued to a crescendo. The scenes where the handler spoke to the demon inside the girl and the skeptic trying to disprove everything were my favorites. The only thing I didn’t care for was the ending sequence, which was a bit artsy for my tastes.
Finally, the acting was top notch, in particular the performance of David Dastmalchian as the Jack Delroy. A movie like this would never get any recognition from the elitist snobs who run the Academy Awards and whose idea of a good movie is one that will put you into a coma from shear boredom, but Dastmalchian should get an Oscar nomination. This is an instant horror classic, one of the best I have watched in years, and you should be streaming this movie ASAP.
In Silver Nitrate, Tristan and Montserrat, an actor and a sound editor from Mexico, both struggling to make a living, befriend an old director, who tells them of a tale of a Nazi who was a practicing sorcerer coming to Mexico in the fifties, and starting a cult of sorts who were captivated by his magic. The director made a film with the Nazi sorcerer that was never finished, and now years later he wants to redub the audio which has magical spells mixed in. After accomplishing this task, they set in motion a reawakening of this magic and the dead Nazi sorcerer that had been dormant for years. Now, they have to deal with seeing dead people, the rebirth of these cults and the sorcerer potentially coming back.
This novel worked at a lot of different levels. The narrative style was compelling. The characterization was strong. The story built at a good pace and worked itself to a crescendo. I listened to the audio version, and the narrator did a strong job at narrating. The world building was also well done. The setting of the story added some dimensions to it, and the author did a good job of conveying the time and place and putting the reader into it. This is the first novel I have read from Silvia Moreno Garcia but not the last. This is a novel that I recommend reading.
It seems as if the overall quality of these movies in this monster mash series has progressively decreased. The best two movies were Kong: Skull Island and the first Godzilla movie. Each one since seems worse than the previous one. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth watching, but the elements that are good are limited to the monster fighting scenes and the visuals of Godzilla destroying everything he passes by.
So the bad here is the plot and anything that might try to pass as logic in the plot. Even worse is the science. Any time there is anything that they are trying to pass off as some sort of scientific explanation causes me to roll my eyes at how ridiculous it is. They should just try to pass it off as pure fantasy, which would make it more plausible. Having said all that, the plot is actually less convoluted than Godzilla vs. Kong.
On the other hand, the monster fighting scenes were worse in this movie than the last one. Also, Mothra, who is a cool monster, is in this movie for reasons that I can’t understand since Mothra isn’t involved in the actual fighting. My favorite parts were Godzilla just laying to waste Italy and Spain and Rio de Janeiro and wherever else he passed through. This is an entertaining movie but not really a good one.
I thought the first Dune movie was a decent movie, but I wasn’t enthralled by it. Part of the issue was that I don’t think the movie did a very good job of explaining the intricate world building in the movie, and that if you weren’t a book reader (which I am not) you were going to miss a lot of it. Prior to watching the second movie in the series, I watched a five minute video explaining the first movie, which I thought was great because it explained many things that I didn’t understand or realize besides just recapping the plot.
I was ready to go for the second movie, and I thought this was much, much better than the first Dune movie. Part of it, I’m sure, is that I understood the world of the story better, but I also thought the plot itself was far superior. The characterization in the story is good. The intrigue of the houses along with how they intersect with the Emperor and the witch women, the Bene Gesserit was interesting and well developed. I wasn’t much into the relationship between Paul and Chani. I thought both the character of Chani and the performance by Zendaya left a lot to be desired. What I thought really worked was Paul’s transformation into the Muad’Dib and his interaction with the Freman people and their prophecy of a messiah. The buildup to the final battle was excellent but the actual battle fell flat with the exception of the knife fight between Paul and the representative from House Harkonnen. The cinematography and special effects were very good. This, overall, is a movie well worth watching.
These were two novellas that can be read together since The Last Train to Perdition immediately follows I Travel by Night. Robert McCammon is one of my all time favorite novelists, and he definitely delivered with these two novellas. He seems to have rediscovered himself as a historical speculative fiction writer, as compared to being a contemporary horror writer early in his career. I liked both the concept behind these stories, a post Civil War nineteenth century vampire who doesn’t want to be a vampire and is striving to undo his condition and become human again, going to war with the vampire community in the process. He takes difficult jobs as a private investigator/bounty hunter/gun for hire as his occupation while trying to find the vampire who turned him.
Of the two novellas, I preferred I Travel by Night, where Trevor Lawson takes on a job to rescue a banker’s daughter who has been kidnapped by the vampire society he hunts. He recognizes this as a trap for him but takes the job anyway. He is joined by Ann Kingsley, the kidnapped woman’s sister, who joins Lawson as his sidekick in the second novella and helps him by doing things by day that he cannot, although that isn’t really explored in either story. In The Last Train to Perdition, Lawson is hired to retrieve a politician’s son, who has fallen in with a group of bandits, where he once again is ambushed by the vampires he is trying to annihilate. I really enjoyed both novellas, but the problem with the second one is that it has a Deux Ex Machina ending that brings it down a notch.
The second novella ends with the promise of more to come in this story, and I look forward to reading more in this story world.
