Too Late
Comedy, as the saying goes, is hard. So is horror, actual scary horror, for very similar reasons. Putting the two together does not reduce the scale of difficulty any. If anything, the difficulty increases as a film now has two different sets of tastes (which may not have any correlation) to appeal to. On the upside, if it does work the final product can be more than the sum of its parts as it pulls from radically different emotions simultaneously into something that shouldn’t work but does, like combining bacon and pineapple on a pizza.
There is a grey middle ground, however, where nothing quite works together or quite falls apart. Maybe it’s scarier than it is funny. Maybe it’s funnier than it is scary. Maybe it’s only kind of funny and kind of scary but not enough of either. Maybe it’s Too Late.
Set in the dank world of on-the-cusp stand-up comedy (which in and of itself is scary enough), Too Late is also the name of one of the top comedy clubs in Los Angeles, a little brother to The Improv or The Comedy Store. It’s one of those places comedians go to be discovered for their first special or sitcom, and thus it’s one of those places where they constantly pester Violet the booker (Limperis) to get them on. But Violet, and Too Late, have a secret as well; they are both owned by ageing comedy legend Bob Devore (Lynch) who keeps himself going by the adulation of his audience and the blood of promising comics he must consume whole during the dark of the moon.
Too Late is certainly not the first film to dramatize the dehumanizing reality of trying to break into entertainment in the form of actual horror, from deals with the devil (Rosemary’s Baby) to sadistic bosses physically and emotionally torturing their employees and vice versa (Swimming With Sharks). It speaks to the nature of the business that these sorts of cliches have so much power. It also means anyone venturing in these waters needs a really deep hook or a new tack beyond just the premise itself. Too Late does not, unfortunately.
What it does have is a lot of humor. Limper and Weldon (as her slowly, possibly, potential boyfriend) in particular have both great chemistry and delivery and the handful of comedy sets Too Late showcases could easily fit themselves into any standup routine anywhere. Nor is it left to just the comedy sets; the characters themselves from the best friends to the monsters are all aware they are in a comedy and bring their best line readings to their best sequences. Taken in bits and pieces it is exactly the absurdist diorama its makers were aiming for.
Taken as a whole, it’s a different beast, not least because the characters – as funny as they can be – exist only in pieces themselves to set up punchlines but more often to set up its statements about life in Hollywood. Just to make sure no one misses out on the direct line Too Late is drawing between its horror movie conceit and the dehumanizing reality of trying to break into entertainment (along with the misanthropic personalities frequently attached to that reality) writer/director D.W. Thomas makes sure to mention them several times particularly with Bob’s offhand shrug that ‘people come and people go.’
It’s possible to be that on the nose without it hurting your story, but not while also trying to be funny and or scary. Too Late’s absurdist humor and absurdist heart are all in the right place but it’s trying to do too much and ultimately trips over its own ambitions.