Late Night Double Feature (2015)
Dirs. Navin Ramaswaran, Zach Ramelan, Torin Langen
Starring: Jamie Elizabeth Sampson, Nick Smyth, Jeff Sinasac, Colin Price, Caleigh Le Grand, Sandra Da Costa, Brian Scott Carleton, Rich Piatkowski
Review By Greg Klymkiw
The tradition of comedy and horror omnibus films is a noble tradition which has generated a cavalcade of genuinely good and even great pictures - everything from the classic British Ealing Studios masterpiece Dead of Night in 1945 to the super-stylish 70s Amicus adaptations of E.C. Comics which yielded the superb 1972 Freddie Francis-directed Tales from the Crypt and Roy Ward Baker's Asylum. These were classy portmanteaus featuring several cool short horror snappers held together by clever wraparound stories.
In the 70s, a new hybrid of omnibus pictures entered the arena which attempted (often successfully) to recreate a slice of a broadcast day in tiny independent TV stations delivering a variety of commercial, news, gameshows and drama (usually of the exploitation variety) including the immortal John Landis laugh-fest Kentucky Fried Movie and Ken Shapiro's glorious celebration of cheese on the idiot box of the 70s called The Groove Tube.
What set these films on a pedestal of sorts is that the humour was often played so straight that the satirical jabs hit home in ways that had audiences rolling in the aisles because the material came so close to the thing that was being satirized, but at the same time, opened a window upon the social and cultural events of the day.
Late Night Double Feature attempts to go a step further, but on its way up, it plunges to the nadir of this genre hybrid. It offers us one fateful night in a small town indie TV station which is unspooling “Dr. Nasty’s Cavalcade of Horror” - live for the insomniacs of the world, or in this case, Peterborough, Ontario and Kawartha Lakes inbred country.
We get to see commercials, trailers, station IDs and host segments involving a mad scientist and a buxom babe sidekick in full nurse regalia. Just below the programming itself, we're delivered a wraparound plot involving abuse, exploitation and eventually, a mad orgy of violence.
On paper, it sounds just fine. In execution, Late Night Double Feature is a nasty, unfunny and incompetent mess which lacks anything resembling style or tone. The trailers and commercials are strictly bottom-feeding spoofs and the two features, “Dinner for Monsters” (involving a chef corralled into preparing a meal out of a dead human body) and “Slit” (an ugly bit of torture porn) are neither scary, nor funny. They do serve up plenty of violence and gore for those craving that and that alone.
The wraparound story is a cliched affair involving the female hostesses's dissatisfaction with the on-camera-and-off abuse she must put up with by the crazed host and the sleazy producer-director of the late night production. The tone of the pieces on-air seems rooted in a never-never-land which exists only for the film itself and the wraparound is obvious and bereft of any narrative interest whatsoever.
Late Night Double Feature has direct-to-VOD written all over it, though frankly, I suspect word will spread quickly amongst the geek brigades about how lame it is that the woeful film will find its way easily enough to illegal torrent downloads for less discriminating fans of gore for the sake of gore.
The movie might think its being clever, funny and fun but that's one of its biggest problems - just conjure up the most denigrating antonyms for the aforementioned words and you'll have a more than apt description for this steaming platter of viscous faecal matter that it attempts to force-feed us with.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One Star
Late Night Double Feature plays at the Canadian Film Fest 2015.