There’s a big difference between being a tight a*s and being an adult. Both David (Aaron Waiton) and especially his fiance Kate (Christine Steel) are struggling to tread that line. They had taken tremendous strides towards adulthood; moving into a new house, landing responsible jobs, and giving up the smoking, drinking and drug use of their college days in favor of rowing machine work-outs. Everything with the new them is just peachy…until Paul shows up.
A scruffy, irrepressibly caustic arrested adolescent and walking pharmaceutical supply company, Paul (Graham Galloway) is also David’s best friend…and was Kate’s boyfriend for two years before his destructive immaturity finally drove them apart. Faster than you can say “off the wagon,” he’s got David partying with beer, booze, pot, pills and coke. Kate indulges the two of them at first, accepting David’s limp explanation that they hadn’t seen each other in a long time and that it wouldn’t happen again.
Of course it does, spectacularly and disastrously, during a house-warming dinner party David and Kate host for their boss, George (Bill Timoney), his trophy wife Sophia (ex-porn starlet Ginger Lynn Allen), geeky co-worker and Big Foot hunter Dwayne (Jody Bradley) and his cute but naive and mousy wife Lillian (Mel Salvatore). Desperately trying to play the adult, Kate quickly finds herself in the role of unwelcome stick-in-the-mud tight a*s, instead. She’s still the apple of Paul’s eye, however. And for all the seemingly random chaos he creates, it turns out that this obnoxious and mean-spirited cretin may have had an agenda from the start, and her name is “Kate.”
“The Last Late Night” is actually a film in two movements. The first half of the film is the first movement; a tedious and sluggish getting-to-know-you segment that goes on far too long. Good screenwriters can convey in about five minutes all the information on which writer/director Scott Barlow burns forty-five. David, Kate, and Paul are typical young suburbanites. They’re not nearly interesting enough to carry an entire picture for forty-five minutes, nor do they grow much after their introductions. Further exacerbating the monotony is that this entire film takes place in this one, extremely bland house, with the exception of several shots in the yard or street.
Only the second half of the film saves it from tanking. IF viewers have managed to hang on through forty-five minutes of these bores and their petty problems, they’re rewarded by the edgy mayhem of the party: Mickeys slipped in drinks, pot smoking galore, cocaine sniffed from a Lazy Susan, adulterous affairs during beer runs, arm-wrestling and moonshine; Barlow packs enough hijinks, tension, nervous laughs and surprise twists into the last fun half of “The Last Late Night” for another two or three films.
There’s nothing fun about any of this for Kate, of course. Whether she’s just inherently a tight a*s or simply determined to act like an adult, in the future, the pretty apple of two men’s eyes might just find herself waking up alone after this eventful late night.
Unfortunately, since Barlow didn’t spread the entertaining mayhem over the flaccid first half, viewers might wake-up, after falling asleep early on, never knowing about all the illicit revelry they missed.
