For a business aligned with mirth, standup comedy uses an awful lot of terms associated with violence: “You killed out there.” “I bombed.” “I murdered ‘em.”
So it might make some sense for a movie set in the L.A. comedy scene to merge with a campy kind of horror. That’s the mash-up in the amusing low rent outing “Too Late” from husband and wife team D.W. Thomas and Tom Becker.
It’s set in the bleak world of alternative comedy spaces in Los Angeles, where comics are lucky to capture the attention of a dozen onlookers in a bagel shop’s off hours. An intermediary dream among the comics who live in closets awaiting their break, is to appear on a midnight showcase of note, in this case “Too Late” hosted by the storied Bob Devore, a longtime player in comedy who opens his stage to new blood.
It’s inspired by the longtime showcase hosted by the actor who plays Devore, Ron Lynch. His “Tomorrow! With Ron Lynch,” which throws in magicians and ventriloquists amid comics well known and not, ran for years at the Steve Allen Theatre until they tore it down for condos in 2017. Since then, it moved to another couple of theaters, including The Hayworth, where this was shot, and more recently went online during the pandemic, in a show offering a strictly limited time slots, called “5 Minutes or Die!”
Which also might have been a better title for “Too Late,” whose real star is Alyssa Limperis, playing a quietly suffering, secretly aspiring comic who books a showcase called “The Death of Comedy” (another good alternate title) at a tiny coffee shop after her thankless day job, being assistant for the revered Bob Devore. This gets her in close proximity to comics she admires, but it also means arranging some terrible things for her boss, who is not only a demanding employer but a quite literal monster.