Movies, music, and more are our picks for Halloween night!
Late Night with the Devil
Channel 4 Player
The horror of 2024? We're back in 1977 for "the live TV event that shocked the nation" - the Halloween episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy. With its host mired in grief, falling ratings, and contract negotiations, the New York chat show needs something huge to stop the Carson colossus. Enter parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell and her teenage patient Lilly D'Abo as the coast-to-coast workout for bowels and bladders begins. A great concept, a brilliant central performance by David Dastmalchian as Delroy, a super cast of unfamiliar faces in support, and the relentlessness of the real-time set-up make this a found-footage rager. And although the never-before-seen backstage moments break the spell somewhat and the finale is a bit rushed, writer-director brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes still go above and beyond to ensure their application for the cult pantheon is a successful one. Give the Devil his due as soon as you can!
The Late Late Show
9:35pm, RTÉ One
Rock royalty on this week's Late Late Show as Jon Bon Jovi joins Patrick Kielty "for a wide-ranging chat ahead of his much-anticipated Croke Park gig next summer, sharing stories from four decades of music, his deep admiration for Thin Lizzy, and the connection he feels with his Irish fans". Also guests on Friday night will be Miriam O'Callaghan, Lynne McGranger aka Irene from Home and Away, the Ireland's Fittest Family coaches, and the Young Hot Guys pranksters.
Bruce Springsteen Night
9:00pm, BBC Four
With the excellent Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere now in cinemas, it's a bumper night of Boss on BBC Four. First up at 9:00pm is a trawl through the Beeb's performance archives for Bruce Springsteen at the BBC. Then, at 10:00pm, we have the acclaimed documentary When Bruce Came to Britain, which "tells the story of how a 26-year-old Springsteen and the E Street Band first arrived in the UK in November 1975 for a sold-out performance at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Eventim Apollo), giving his new album Born to Run its European premiere". Sharing memories alongside the man himself are guitarist and E Street Band member Stevie Van Zandt, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Michael Palin, "who wrote about the first Hammersmith gig in his famous diary"; Springsteen's manager and producer Jon Landau, promoter Harvey Goldsmith, and "Springsteen superfan" Rob Brydon, "who talks about the connection he has had with Bruce's music". Then, at 11:00pm, it's a screening of the concert film Hammersmith Odeon, '75, Springsteen and the E Street Band's European concert debut.
The Vast of Night
Prime Video
The best sci-fi film of 2020 went under the radar of the masses, but anyone who has seen The Vast of Night won't be long in ordering others to do the same. Andrew Patterson's superb thriller is set in 1950s New Mexico, where things start going bleep in the night during a school basketball game. Teenage DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) investigate while nails are pared down to the quick on the other side of the screen. On a budget of $700,000, Patterson salutes the masterworks of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter and classic TV shows The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but - in his debut feature - he also stakes a claim to his own part of the movie universe with a bravura that really is out of this world.
Never Grow Old
12:15am, RTÉ One
Dublin director Ivan Kavanagh crafted a great addition to the one-man-stands-tall honour roll with this story of supping with the devil, filmed in Connemara, in a co-production with, wait for it, Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy knew quality when they read it, and so did US stars Emile Hirsch and John Cusack, who found some gold in Glengowla Mines outside Oughterard. Our West becomes the rain-soaked California of 1849, where Irish undertaker Patrick Tate (Hirsch) can't keep up with the business after man in black Dutch Albert (Cusack) rides into liquor-free town and decides to transform it into his own infernal kingdom. Hirsch is suitably understated as the mouse nibbling at the cheese in the trap and has the perfect foil in Cusack, who is nothing short of a revelation as the whispering monster. Recalling both Randall Flagg from Stephen King's The Stand and - ironically - The Undertaker from the WWE, Cusack does some of the best work of his lengthy career as the goading dark side of the humble hero's mind, proving once again that anyone who's talented at comedy also has all the goods when it comes to being bad. Rarely has a knock on the door had so much dread behind it...
