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Late Night with the Devil (2023)
Kaleidoscope of tropes, but fun enough
I get excited whenever I see a new horror movie getting good reviews, but there's nothing very original here. The premise is interesting but underdeveloped, and mostly just a mechanism to ride 70s nostalgia and do cute "Technical Difficulties" cuts. The pacing is off and kills a lot of suspense, although there is a cool "How much of this is planned?" dynamic early on. The special effects were weak, the possession scenes are pretty mid-tier (doesn't compare to other recent horror, "Talk With Me."), and by the end the movie runs through a kaleidoscope of tropes that ultimately don't amount to much.
Overall, the movie is fun enough if you're marathoning horror films in October, but nothing to go out of your way for.
The Rehearsal (2022)
Impressive production value and attention-to-detail, but completely disjointed, empty, and fruitless
I know this will be unpopular, but I honestly find "The Rehearsal" to be complete trash and not that funny.
The most impressive thing is the big-budget effort to recreate environments and attention to little details, but the whole substance of this show is constant meta awkwardness and, "Here's the actor to play the actor to play the actor!"
Nathan clearly puts in a lot of work into building these situations, but there's almost zero pay-off.
I know the title is "The Rehearsal," and the show is meant to blur the line between what is "real" and what is "scripted," but everything in the show comes off completely inauthentic and manufactured.
Even in a dumb (but entertaining) show like "Impractical Jokers," you get a great combination of "contrived scenarios" with "real people reactions."
In "The Rehearsal" it's not clear if *any* of the reactions are genuine or authentic. That's a cute intellectual exercise (for 6 straight episodes), but it leaves the viewer waiting for something to actually happen - and the pay-off never comes.
If the show is completely scripted, then the script sucks. If the show has any real world responses, you either can't tell or they aren't that interesting.
Again, I suppose that's an interesting concept, but there's zero substance here. Nathan being meticulously OCD and making stupid faces isn't enough here.