Longlegs

 

Hell, Oh Doll Lee

Longlegs
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Canada/USA 2024
Black Bear
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Some slight spoilers.

Set in 1995, Longlegs is the latest film written and directed by Oz Perkins, who is the son of Anthony Perkins (yeah, that’s right, he’s Norman Bates son... a role he played on film too as young Norman in Psycho II). And I think this is only the second film I’ve seen by him. I saw February (aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter) a couple of years ago and wrote a review at the time, which still hasn’t seen the light of day on this blog but it is coming, honest. This is what happens when you write faster than you can publish... I have over 240 written reviews waiting in the wings, as it were, at this point (score a big plus to the paranoia of the ‘what if I’m ill one week... need to write a few to keep in hand’ mentality).

Now this one I didn’t know he was connected to until a few days after I saw the trailer. All I know is, the trailer was a rare and completely unsettling two and a bit minutes and, I have to say, most of the film is exactly like this. I do have a problem with this film’s third act but I’ll get to it in a minute.

The Longlegs of the title is a kind of deranged/supernatural serial killer of sorts (although he doesn’t actually do the killing himself... I’ll get to that) played by Nicolas Cage and, honestly, the make-up he’s in for the film is so good, if I didn’t know it was Cage then I wouldn’t have guessed. And the main protagonist of the movie is  FBI Special Agent Lee Harker, as played by Maika Monroe, who was so good in movies like The Guest (reviewed here) and It Follows (reviewed here).

Now it’s set up early on that Harker has special, pretty much psychic powers which give a certain insight as to the suspects she is after. And so she’s handed the case of a series of killings which have been going on since the late 1960s, where the fathers of each family have killed all of them and then taken their own lives. But strange notes and symbols are left by a person at the scene of each one, tying these seemingly unrelated blood baths together.

And it’s a quite good movie. The intensity and chaos of the movie is, pretty much, as it plays in the trailer. It’s also fairly inventive and I think could have also been sustained as a mini series in terms of the amount of intrigue and plot twists it offers up as things unfold. Especially in regards to Harper’s own connection to the case, which I’m guessing the audience will realise a lot quicker than her character does. There is a genuine sense of creeping dread pervading the film and, Cage’s deranged performance as the rarely seen Longlegs is just the cherry on top.  

But the person who really carries this movie is Maika Monroe. She plays the character as a very muffled, reclusive type, almost like she’s got a high level of autism to her make up... and she does it very well. And the reason she is like this throughout the film is explained towards the end and makes perfect sense... and when I say explained, I mean shown to us via a gunshot to a doll’s head, which ushers in unconsciousness for a while... but that’s all I’m saying about that.

For me though, the third act where everything pulls together and the story elements are explained, seemed a bit of a cop out. The identity of a certain other individual that Harper is also looking for is pretty obvious by about halfway through the film (or it seemed like it to me, anyway) and it all just felt a bit overly complicated and overwrought in terms of the supernatural element involved (yeah, this isn’t a serial killer thriller... it’s a proper horror film for sure). So... I have to say that, for me, all the incredible build up went down with a bit of a damp squib of a last 20 minutes or so. That being said, though, the explanations for everything that does go down at least seem to make a certain logical sense and, yeah, to me the writing of this element felt very much like the kind of straight-to-video-rental movies of the 1980s in terms of building up something which, if enough people rented it, could be expanded into a franchise. So it does at least live up to it’s own premise... I can’t fault it for that.

And yeah, at the end of the day and despite the end reel, I must say I really enjoyed Longlegs. It is predictable in places but it’s also incredibly chilling and suspenseful and so, yeah, if you’re a horror movie fan, I’d say this one is definitely worth taking a look at. And I’d even advise checking out the trailer to this one to get a full flavour of it before you go. Despite my reaction to the denouement, I think a lot of people are going to like this one and, perhaps, at least half the audience might not see the end reveals coming. So catch it at some point, is what I say.

Greta

Hands Held And Greta

Greta
2018 Ireland/USA
Directed by Neil Jordan
UK cinema release print.

I’d never even heard of this film, Greta, until sometime last week when I saw... gasp... a poster up at my local cinema promoting a movie starring one of the greatest French actresses of our time in the title role, Isabelle Huppert. I was pretty much up for anything with her in it so I watched a trailer on YouTube and, although it looked vaguely like one of those bad and tediously predictable serial stalker movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s (the likes of Fatal Attraction and Single White Female, you know the kinds of films I’m on about, I’m sure) I was pretty much up for even going to see one of those because, with Huppert in the role of a psycho, I assumed this would be very special indeed.

If I’d had bothered to check the credits to see who had directed this I might have hesitated briefly because I find Neil Jordan mostly misses for me but, even then, his last film was an absolute beauty (the amazing vampire film Byzantium, reviewed by me here) so I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have steered clear of this one. I also quite like Chloë Grace Moretz, who plays main protagonist to Huppert’s smouldering antagonist so, yeah, there wasn’t much question about me going to see this one.

Alas, there are some things about this which worked for me and other things which... really didn’t.

The performances were all pretty good... even though the writing was kinda clichéd throughout. Huppert plays a standard Hollywood style psychopath with style and relish but there doesn’t seem to be much else to distinguish her character from dozens of other such characters since cinema began. She does it very well but I kinda felt this great actress didn’t have enough to get her teeth into, to be honest. Similarly, Moretz plays a pretty good, slow burn of a victim and Maika Monroe, who played the lead in the excellent modern virus/curse horror It Follows (reviewed here) does a pretty good job as her flat mate.

The set up hook is pretty good too. Instead of the main antagonist slowly building up an obsession with someone they already know, we have a crazy lady who is baiting possible victims by leaving handbags on subway trains, waiting for each one to be returned so she can start a twisted relationship with them (you know all this anyway, from the trailer). So far so good but, alas, the course of the film rapidly strays into familiar territory which, frankly, I’ve seen too many times. It’s done well and I am often the first to point out that just because something is a cookie cutter template of others of a certain genre, then that doesn’t matter as long as it’s done competently. I think for me though, even as much as I like a decent thriller, this particular kind of overdone Hollywood sub-genre is just something I’m not that into. Other people who are into this kind of thing, though, will eat this one up, I suspect.

And, to be fair, there are some nice moments in the movie. There’s a sequence where we are slowly zooming in on a cup of coffee being heated in a microwave and then, as it pings to an end, the background music cuts off and we are left with just a shot of a dark microwave door. Alas, rather than holding that shot for a while, the director chooses to immediately go into something else after a second... I wish he’d have rested on that shot aftermath for just a little longer, though, because it was one of the more effective moments in the film for me.

Another thing he does is a nice thing with a dream sequence and, though what he does is not exactly original to the movies (I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment by mentioning what he does here) it did take me a little while into the scene before I figured out he’d deliberately entrusted that the audience would decode the visuals in a specific way before pulling the carpet out from underneath their feet. Alas, I was still sufficiently ahead of the game here to realise what was going on way before it happened but it was still quite skillfully handled and I have to applaud him for that.

Another nice thing about this one is Javier Navarrete’s very appropriate score and it goes way over the top into the jagged, chaotic, almost atonal territory of a horror movie but, used in a thriller like this, the style of music proves very powerful and certainly adds significantly to the tension created in some of the scenes, I think. Also, it’s quite well 'spotted' and so the absence of music in certain scenes is just as good an artistic decision as when the score cues enter and exit the movie. Jerry Goldsmith would have applauded that, I think.

And... yeah, I don’t have much more to add to this, I’m afraid. The cast were good but I felt they were kind of wasted here, to a certain extent. Ditto for Neil Jordan who had held me spellbound with Byzantium but here just disappointed me with the sheer ‘yuppie Hollywoodland’ feel of the entire movie. Bottom line, I probably wouldn’t recommend this to any of my friends but certainly most people who like these kinds of thrillers, even those who can see the cookie cutter nature of the scenes, not to mention, the nature of the ‘cookie cutter’ scene (no, I won’t explain, you’ll see it coming before it even happens), will probably get a lot more out of this one than I did. So, certainly not a pan from me but something I don’t personally have to watch again at any rate. Greta wasn’t a great film but it was well put together for what it was. I’ll leave it at that.

Independence Day - Resurgence

Resurge Gainsbourg

Independence Day - Resurgence
2016 USA Directed by Roland Emmerich
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Technically a slight spoiler for
the original movie, if you’ve never seen it.

Hmmm... okay. I guess we all remember the trailer campaign for the original Independence Day in 1996, right? Those of us who are old enough to remember... which it turns out wasn’t the case with the girl selling me my ticket to this screening, when I asked her about how this one was.

It was kind of a ‘wearing you down’ campaign for a hugely budgeted movie about Americans saving the planet from alien invaders by hacking into their alien technology with an Apple computer. This was in the days when Apple were truly great, of course, and not the huge, greedy, corporate money trap they’ve become in just the last few years. We all kinda half trusted Roland Emmerich in those days because he’d caught the current zeitgeist... or more like recreated it... when he brought out a movie before this called Stargate. So when we all sat down to watch the original Independence Day in cinemas, in spite of the gruelling trailer campaign, most of us kinda liked it. Which was okay and lasted about as long as until we got the home video version when, I suspect, a good deal of us realised that we would never want to watch this rubbish ever again.

So here we have a sequel that nobody wanted... or at least I didn’t... taking place 20 years after the original movie in both reality and fictional terms and calling itself Independence Day - Resurgence. I didn’t really want to see this one at all, to be honest, but I’d rather see it on my Cineworld Unlimited card for free (more or less) to find out if it’s any good rather than risk buying a cheap blu ray in a sale at a later point. So I went down to my local on its first Saturday morning and was astonished to find, just like the screening of Gods Of Egypt the week before (reviewed here), that there were only five people, including myself, in the screening for the 3D showing. So, yeah... wondering what that will mean for the box office.

Now, as it turns out, I quite enjoyed this sequel and found it to be a lot more engaging than the first movie. What surprised me, though, is that it felt like a different kind of film. Although the budget for this was somewhere around 165 million dollars... which is just silly... I would be lying if I were to say the money was easy to see on the screen and, despite an abundance of relatively impressive special effects shots, it actually felt more like a small, chamber piece of a sequel, rather than a full blown affair. The original movie back in 1996 maybe suffered from feeling too much like it was trying to be an epic movie. This time around, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be too splashy and, surprisingly, that really helps it, I think.

Anyone hoping to see Will Smith reprise his character will have to make do with the substitute of that character’s son, played by Jessie T. Usher. He doesn’t get a heck of a lot of screen time to be honest but it’s okay because, like the first film, he’s joined by some great actors, a fair few who were veterans of the first movie. So we have newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Angelababy and the always watchable William Fichtner, mixing it up with the likes of the charismatic Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, the brilliant Bill Pullman and, playing a slightly less irritating version of the character he played in the first movie... Brent Spiner. And the icing on the cake is the amazingly brilliant actress Charlotte Gainsbourg playing the love interest/female professor element to the film, Catherine Marceaux .

Okay, so a bunch of cool cast members does not a cool movie make but, like I said, we’re in luck because this feels a little different to the kind of movie the first one was. I mentioned above that it’s not just been made twenty years later... it’s set twenty years after the first film too. What that means in terms of the world that survived the alien invasion in that first one is that man has evolved into a species where every nation is at peace and where the technology has advanced to a level far removed by where we are in the real world. This is pure science fiction in that we have a weapons defence system around the Earth, a moonbase and... yeah, it’s definitely a highly futuristic version of 2016 presented here. So it feels less like it’s trying to be a disaster movie and maybe that’s why, in general, this sequel is a lot more pacier and entertaining than the first outing. It doesn’t hurt that it doesn’t have the humongous running time of the first one either. It’s a straight two hours but, this time around, it doesn’t get dull and it flies by real fast, I have to say.

The film is quite clichéd, as you would expect it to be, but that doesn’t rip the teeth out of those old tried and tested movie conventions and helps build drama in a way that you can tell the director is an old hand at manipulating people’s emotion through moving image... which is no bad thing when you are directing a sequel that nobody really wants, I guess. For instance, the writers spend a good deal of time setting up just how powerful the Earth’s defence against any returning invasion forces are and, when they start doing this, you just know they’re setting you up so that they can quickly rip them out from under you and bring you back to the equivalent of bows and arrows against the Gods and... yeah, that pretty much happens and exactly when you’d expect it to, to be honest. But, in a way, you kind of know that has to happen in order to move the story on so it’s not so much of a disappointment and, like I said... it’s an entertaining movie.

The writers also, however, add another factor to this movie which I don’t want to spoil too much but... lets just say, there’s a lot of scope for a future sequel and if that happens, it’s probably not going to be going in a direction that someone who hasn’t seen this particular movie would expect it to go in. I don’t want to spoil the surprises here but, suffice it to say, man shouldn’t always be arrogant enough to think he’s the most important species in the Universe and that’s kinda highlighted here, no doubt about that.

Now, I would have loved it if David Arnold could have returned to score this sequel to one of his big movie hits but, alas, this time the scoring duties go to Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker (the latter being credited as Thomas Wander on this one, for some reason). Now, it’s really not a bad bit of scoring and I am going to see what it plays like on its own (assuming a proper, physical CD gets released) but I did feel it sounded a little inappropriate and over-the-top in its thematic exuberance at certain points. However, this probably just means I’ll enjoy it a hell of a lot more as a stand alone album so... yeah, that’ll happen for me at some point, I think. It mostly seems to work though so... would’ve been nice to reunite Arnold with the franchise but this isn’t too bad either.

And that’s me done for this movie. I kinda liked this one and I really wasn’t expecting to. The script isn’t terrible, the line delivery is good and it doesn’t quite throw the USA patriotic thing down your throat constantly like the original movie seemed to do... which is always a good thing.  If you liked the first Independence Day movie, then you probably won’t have too much of a problem with this one. If you didn’t think the first one was all that great then.. you might be pleasantly surprised because Independence Day: Resurgence is a much smaller affair compared to the large sprawl of the first film. There’s a good chance you won’t be bored here at all, in fact. I was quite glad I gave it a go, even though the trailer looked terrible, so... yeah, maybe give this one a chance.

It Follows

Casting The Hormones

It Follows
2014/15  US
Directed by David Robert Mitchell 
UK cinema release print.

Okay then. What we have here is a movie which has been warmly welcomed by afficionados of the horror genre, from its tour of various one off and preview screenings on the festival circuit and the usual venues this kind of movie rears its head at before getting a general release or distribution deal... and it deserves its warm welcome in spades. It’s also been called fresh and original and, there, I think, I’d have to disagree although I will say that, while anything but original, I don’t think it’s supposed to be. I’m sure the writer/director would be the first to point out the postmodernistic references he’s wearing so warmly on his fear tinted sleeve but, even though this film takes no prizes for new ideas... it does do what it aims to do extremely well and, frankly, with a lot of affection towards the genres and styles it’s eclectically gathering together in its warm, parodic embrace.

So lets unmask a little of its historical legacy here and say that, like the title of this review suggests, this is yet another version of the old “pass the curse on” story popularised by writer M. R. James in his short story Casting The Runes. Of course, there have been numerous versions of this story at the cinema and on TV over the years and my readers will probably best remember both the ones that were freely adapted from this tale such as Night Of The Demon (aka Curse Of The Demon 1957 - reviewed here), Casting The Runes (1979 - reviewed here) and probably the modern variants which were, like this one, using the story as a starting point such as Ringu (aka Ring 1998) or just not being very open about their sources, such as the excellent Drag Me To Hell (2009 and with a mini review here).

The basic plot of the original story is that a man puts a curse on a man who will be escorted from this mortal coil by a demon unless he lifts the curse by passing it back somehow within a certain amount of time. In the Japanese movie Ringu (loosely based on Koji Suzuki’s novel, which still very much owes a debt to M. R. James' original short) the curse takes the form of a virus caught by watching a cursed video tape and the way you pass the curse on to another is to copy the movie (thus perpetrating the act of widening the scope of the virus) and then showing that duplicate to another person. In It Follows, writer/director David Robert Mitchell strips out the elaborate ‘cure all’ concept and complications behind said solution that Ringu added to the mix and boils it down to this: you have to have sex with someone to pass the curse on to them. If that person then dies, the demon, if that’s what IT is in It Follows, will then kill the next person back up the line and follow the chain back... so if you are a victim you have to not only pass it on, but convince the next person to pass it on and so on.

Another thing that Mitchell cleverly does here is not bother to explain or enlighten as to the origins of the shape-shifting, relentless and ultimately unstoppable demon in this story. And, similarly, the teenage characters in this one refreshingly make no attempt to try and trace back the history of the curse and to stop it in its tracks. Which is actually fine because, as amply demonstrated with this very smart and self aware genre movie, modern audiences really don’t need to know the origins of a character in a story to be able to reap the benefits of the way that character - hero, villain or thing - interacts with the immediate environment... as long as it does interact in the most entertaining way possible. They just need to know what the rules of engagement are, so to speak, and just leave it at that. Which is something, I have to say, that the makers of various superhero and comic book movie adaptations in the last decade or two still haven’t managed to cotton onto yet... although it’s something horror movie makers have known for quite some time (you’d think they’d share the secret with the comic book people at some point, no?). In this film, the teenage protagonists are going for the short route... lure the thing in and then try kill it. Whether they have any measure of success at that is something I will certainly not spoil for you here.

Now It Follows, it has to be said, gets a lot of things right in its all too brief running time and I’d have to say, in terms of the genre, it’s just about a near perfect example of this kind of movie that you’re likely to get. I think this one is going to be talked about by people and written about in academic studies on sex, gender politics and horror movies, for decades to come... and I’m happy to say that one of the things that the film absolutely gets right is the teenage characters. I’m 47 years old and I have to say, the teenagers in this movie weren’t in any way scripted to annoy the buggery out of me (like a good deal of teenage horror movies are these days... just compare this to the awful Ouija - reviewed here) and I found that I could actually identify with them. Now, part of that may be because the characters aren’t fleshed out to any great detail but the dialogue seems fairly adult and the various actors and actresses cast in the roles, especially the main, cursed protagonist Jay, played very low key and convincingly by Maika Monroe, all knock it out of the park in terms of their performances. This is a smart movie populated by smart actresses and actors, so this is all very good.

The other great thing it’s got going for it is a sense of reverence and respect for the good old mid-1970s to mid-1980s teenage horror flick, and you see it in every frame of the film. Now, I didn’t like a lot of the American horror flicks from around that time (most people my age would have first caught them on dodgy VHS tapes rented out from the local off-licence) but this has a lot in common with the best of them and it seems like the whole movie has been shot through some kind of special lens which gives it a sort of built-in filtered nostalgia for people my age. And I really appreciated that.

It’s not afraid to be silent and reflective, for example. There are lots of quiet patches in this movie where people are just looking or, more often than not, the camera is making voyeuristic passes at the surrounding scenery while the characters are doing their thing off screen. This is epitomised in a shot where two of the main characters go to find out the true identity of the man who passed the curse on to Jay. The two go into an office reception area at a university but the camera stops following them before they reach their destination and, instead, starts doing slow, 360 degree pans around the general vicinity... which is the kind of thing you would probably get a lot more of in European cinema than standard US film-making, at least contemporary US film-making, it seems to me. Of course, what the director is also doing is building tension and milking the suspense by constantly checking out the periphery of the characters... once the audience knows to look out for something, never the same figure twice, the director can start playing with the voyeuristic angle and start creeping out the audience by showing things happening in the background to raise the hairs on the back of the neck before the creature actually, legitimately, arrives... which is what all good horror movies do to a certain extent, of course.

The other thing that helps considerably in this movie is the soundtrack by a group called Disasterpeace, which is also very much feeding off a late 1970s American horror movie vibe. If you think back to scores like Phantasm and, more pointedly, John Carpenter’s great scores to Halloween and The Fog, where rhythms and jarring, jangling effects on repeat mode resembling Bernard Herrmann’s famous Psycho musical stings on acid would key in and inform the ears and heartbeats of the audience, elevating the suspense and fear factor up to eleven, then you’ll get an idea of what this score is like. It’s not just modern, horror movie sound design embracing dissonance. In some sequences it’s quite melodic and its definitely “the real deal” as far as this humble audience member is concerned. And, again to the director’s credit, he doesn’t bury the score in the mix like most modern directors do with their product... he knows exactly what his composers and musicians have delivered to him here and he lets it breathe... pushing it right into the foreground and floating it above the sound effects for a lot of the movie. Such a shame, then, that you can only currently purchase the score digitally as I would really like to get a proper CD soundtrack of this one... it’s a really great score.

And it’s a really great movie.

Horror afficionados of a certain age should get a lot out of this film. Sure it’s filled with clichés but what modern horror movie isn’t... in fact, those kind of key moments are absolutely essential, a lot of the time, to making a genre piece like this work and Mitchell certainly seems to recognise this. The point being, that the rules and tropes of the horror movie are executed absolutely perfectly in this one... so younger audiences should get a good hit off of this movie too. And, of course, since we still know nothing about the creature who is pursing the human chain of sexual encounters, we still have the possibility of sequels sharing that mythology and expanding on it in future versions of a franchise... so that should keep the Hollywood bean counters happy on this one and I wouldn’t be surprised if I am writing the review up on here for the sequel in a couple of years’ time. Either way, this one’s a bit of a masterpiece and I urge anyone who likes a decent horror movie, especially those who have a certain affection for the stylistic leanings of 1970s movies, to give It Follows a look soon. I doubt you’ll regret it.