So here’s two random horror movies on Shudder.

Autopsy came on after a Joe Bob (I’m saving my quick hit roundup of Joe Bob movies for some point when it feels like a season is over) where the featured movie was The Autopsy of Jane Doe; very clever programming, Shudder folks.

This is a 1975 giallo, and it’s one of the really weird ones — “completely batshit” is what I wrote in my notes. The basic plot is… y’know what, it kinda doesn’t matter, because I’m not convinced it really hangs together in the end anyway. But okay, there’s a woman who is studying suicide, and therefore is spending a lot of time with corpses and the like; and then she meets a woman under mysterious circumstances who seems to be tied up with her dad somehow, only for her to show up as a “suicide” corpse later. So she pulls on that thread, and sets in motion a series of convoluted and implausible events and revelations and twists, and a lot more people will be dead before it’s all over.

But you don’t watch a giallo for the story, you watch it for the vibe, and this one does deliver that ’70s Italian atmosphere that you look for from the genre, with the notable oddness that it’s got a ton of nudity, like absolute boatloads of it, but is maybe the least erotic giallo I’ve seen. (And as bad as The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion was about consent, this is somehow even worse. Mid-century Italy, yikes.) Not exactly recommended, but interesting in its own way.

Late Night With the Devil is a very recent movie — I think it got a theatrical release last year, but just premiered on Shudder recently. It’s a Shudder original, I guess, but the beginning of the movie showed like a literal dozen of those production-company animated logo sequences (so many that when the actual movie began, I thought that it was another one for a good 10-15 seconds), so I guess a lot of people threw in a few hundred bucks each to get this made.

It’s a found footage movie, allegedly showing the broadcast tape of a Halloween episode of a late night talk show, along with some backstage footage. We get this premise in a very extended narrated intro that is maybe the clumsiest thing about the movie: It goes on and on, and basically gives us a ton of infodumping that it feels like we could have gotten more organically somehow (or arguably could have figured out from context later without the infodump).

But when the talk show footage starts, things pick up, because it does a good job of capturing the cadences and rhythms of a late night talk show, where they bring on a psychic who can talk to the souls of the dead, a doctor with her little girl patient who is allegedly possessed by a demon, and a James Randi-style skeptic who’s there to debunk the other acts. Of course, because we all know what genre this is, we also know that this probably isn’t all bunk in the first place, which always feels a little unfair to the skeptics, but what’re you gonna do — if you don’t put skeptical people in the movie, it doesn’t feel grounded enough.

But while the main body of the movie is good, I think it falls apart at the end; it gets messy with lots of “what is even real?” nested scenarios, plus throws too many elements in rather than concentrating down on what’s really important: There’s a core conflict that should be the animating throughline of the movie, but it tends to fall to the background and even at the climax is just one note among many.

On the whole, I’m going to put this one into the “not exactly recommended, but interesting” bucket too, though in a very different way.