#49: LONGLEGS

Starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michcelle Choi-Lee and Dakota Daulby. Written and directed by Osgood Perkins. budget $10 million. Running time 101 minutes.

Maika Monroe is Lee Harker, a low budget Clarice Starling, and likewise FBI agent with psychic abilities who's assigned to investigate the 'Longlegs' cases, a series of mass family murders that stretch back decades that all have two similarities, each of the young girls killed in the attacks all share the same birthday and a letter written in code was left at the scene of the massacres signed 'Longlegs'.

Within a gnat's fart, old Harker has solved the cryptic code and the connection between all the murders and sets off to find out what it all has to do with her memories of a strange white haired old man who visited her single mom decades earlier when she was just nine years old. And whether it has anything to do with Harker's boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and his eight year-old daughters impending birthday...

Murky to look at, gloomy to watch and unrelentingly miserable, this is a film lit by 30 watt bulbs where not a shred of sunlight breaks through, where everybody is depressed, and horribleness lurks behind every corner. Lee Harker mopes about the whole film, looking like she's clinically depressed and every character is as damaged emotionally as she is. Indeed everyone appears to be half asleep. 

I liked the trailer and went into this thinking it was going to be a later-day take on Silence of the Lambs, with a horror twist, but what it was instead was yet another horror film with Christianity at its core, or the Devil, because all the recent horror films I've watched have been about the Devil and evil manifest, indeed this one ends with a close up of Longlegs's face as he blissfully cries out "HAIL SATAN."

This was most certainly not for me. Growing up, my formative years were spent watching every single stalk-and-slash serial killer movie that came out in the 1980s and 90s, and after years of 24-hour horror movie marathons at the Scala Cinema in Kingscross I think my capacity for horror films got burned out. This just left me sad and bored, I've seen it all before and there's nothing new here, apart from Nicolas Cage as Longlegs who I wanted to know more about, the trouble is by making him supernatural I failed to connect and lost interest, if he'd been more human I'd have been far more invested, his crimes would have been more horrific, however the reveal of how he managed to be involved in so many mass murders over the years is so ludicruous and revealed as one huge plot reveal late in the third act that I lost any patience I might have had with it. 

I'm fascinated by Hollywood's obsession with these types of horror films where evil always wins, it's all so nihilistic and bleak. There is no hope, no salvation, just the cold embrace of the grave. Enjoy.

6/10