Two serial killer movies I thought would be horror movies

You might be scoffing at the distinction I'm making in that subject line, but you shouldn't be.

Serial killers may appear in horror movies, and frequently do. But not all movies featuring serial killers are horror movies, and in fact, many are not. 

Is Se7en a horror movie? Of course it isn't. It has horrific elements to it, and it may disturb you more than most horror movies, but it isn't scary. Or if it is scary, it's scary more for making you consider the depravity of which human beings are capable, not scary in a "boo!" sort of way.

Se7en is a serial killer movie, which means it focuses more on the people solving those crimes, not the victims of those crimes. I suppose the more general, overarching genre would be "crime movie."

Which is a fine kind of movie, if a little played out. It's just not the type of movie I was expecting when I saw the double feature of MaXXXine and Longlegs on Thursday night.

MaXXXine, the far (far) better of the two movies, might have rightly expected to adhere more to the conventions of horror as a result of the two movies that preceded it in Ti West's apparently now-completed trilogy. X is probably most correctly described as a slasher movie, given that it has an unfathomable killer as its adversary, whereas Pearl blurs the lines a bit more, to its great benefit. It's a killer origin story, but it's more of a pastoral period piece that morphs into a horror movie over the course of its running time. Anyway, both are characterised as horror on IMDB.

As is MaXXXine, but should it be? The distinctions are interesting here. X gets the genre designations of horror, mystery and thriller. I'm not sure about "mystery" there, but okay. Pearl, as an indication of its more complex tone, gets drama, horror and thriller. MaXXXine gets crime and horror, and it's the crime designation that saps some of the value of the horror designation.

I'd argue that the difference between different sorts of serial killer movies is whether there are detectives intimately involved. There are detectives intimately involved in MaXXXine, so intimately involved that they are played by A-list, or close to A-list, actors in Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale. The story is not told from their perspective, and we don't witness their activities outside of their interactions with the protagonist, but they keep popping up throughout the story, interrogating our main character and trying to get her to help them solve a series of murders. It's enough to give the film a major whiff of the serial killer movie rather than the horror movie, an impression strengthened by the use of a number of serial killer movie cliches, like coroners examining bodies, and pentagrams burned into the flesh of victims.

Longlegs, an absolute piece of shit, goes full serial killer movie, though it thinks it is a horror, which is all the more embarrassing.

Before I go off ripping Longlegs a new asshole, I want to establish two things:

1) I still dearly love a horror movie by the director of Longlegs and consider it to be one of the best horror movies of the 21st century. I adore Osgood Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter. I just want to say that to give some context to the things I'm about to say.

2) More context: Apparently, I and another friend I've spoken to about Longlegs are in the minority about this movie. Apparently, most people really like it. I have no idea why that is. But if you must take what I'm saying with that grain of salt, take it.

Perkins' career has been composed of prestige horror, which has included Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, in addition to Blackcoat's Daughter. So we would naturally expect that his new movie would also be prestige horror.

But this movie isn't two minutes old before it starts dumping on us the worst and most embarrassing cliches of 1990s serial killer movies. I could name them but it would get exhausting. Never mind, I will:

1) The brilliant but closed off and socially inept female FBI agent.

2) The serial killer who has a personal relationship with that FBI agent.

3) The serial killer who communicates with that FBI agent through encoded messages left at murder scenes, where only the FBI agent can crack the code (and does so suspiciously easily).

4) Indications of devil worship and other religious themes.

5) Murders that occur according to some precise alignments of dates, which form a shape only when those dates are viewed in exactly that way. 

6) Other stupid numerology.

7) An older FBI sidekick for our main character whose role is to be supportive but also to throw cold water on most of our main character's hunches.

8) And oh yeah, hunches that suggest some sort of supernatural ability by our main character.

9) Multiple bits of serial killer iconography used randomly and in seeming contradiction with one another.

10) Appearances of the serial killer "in the wild" (like the time spent with Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs) that are meant to make him more disturbing, but in this case, do not.

Yes, Nicolas Cage as the title character (not a spoiler, it's revealed in the opening credits) is not scary at all in this movie. 

I don't want to get into all the ways Longlegs fails as a movie -- as a horror, as a serial killer movie, as any movie at all. I'm saving that for my review, which will be posted in a couple days and which you'll be able to see to the right at that time. (The MaXXXine review is already there. But if you're reading this a lot later, you can click to it here.) 

For the purposes of this particular piece, let's just say that Perkins' few gestures toward actual horror movie content are very limp by his previous standards, and are mostly undone by the trappings of the serial killer movie.

So I left this double feature at the Sun in Yarraville feeling significantly annoyed by the baits and switches to which I was subjected, at least marginally liking the first movie. But since MaXXXine is much better in its first half and Longlegs is good in no half, that left me without about three hours of disappointing movie to end my night.

A serial killer of my buzz, indeed. 

Toe trauma follows me

I wrote a week ago about how I was about to lose the nail on my left big toe. You can read here if you want to discover all the gruesome details. I paired it with having watched the movie Fingernails, because, obviously.

Later that same day, the nail came off. It was a real relief. No more gingerly putting on socks to prevent tearing it out prematurely.

Who could have guessed that wouldn't even be the worst thing to happen to that toe in that seven-day period. 

On Sunday, while building a fence between our yard and sidewalk, I dropped a heavy fence panel on the same foot. In fact, it was only half of a heavy fence panel since we needed to halve it to fit the spot where we wanted it. Imagine what it might have done if it had been the whole thing.

It wasn't just clumsiness. I had the panel resting on a wall about three feet off the ground, where I had intended to remove some screws from some strips running along the height of the panel. It got too close to the edge, where there was nothing to stop it from slipping off and landing on my foot. 

And because I was wearing these old, thin running shoes -- which I've taken to wearing because of the days we've been painting -- I got basically no protection from my shoe, to say nothing of the exposure caused by the missing toenail.

I could tell I'd gotten myself good and let out a string of PG-13 expletives, my son playing basketball nearby and all. 

He rushed over -- for about the third time that day, since I'd had other minor mishaps that caused me to shout out -- and asked if I was okay. This time I knew I wasn't. When I took the shoe off, the end of my sock was soaked with blood.

It turns out the laceration was the worst part, and the bleeding was pretty continuous for several hours, despite my wife's attempts to wrap it and stop the bleeding. Long story short, we finally went to the ER about five hours later, where they couldn't do anything for us since it was a Sunday night and the radiology department only works until 6. We did get the wound properly dressed but left after nearly two ineffectual hours of seeing a couple different people who couldn't really progress the care. The next morning, I returned to discover I did have a small break at the end of the toe, the kind that would heal on its own as long as I took care of it properly. So now I'm wearing a big bandage that covers that toe and the next one, wrapping them in a bag when I go in the shower, and loath to put on a sock or a shoe.

The connection to movies? Why of course there is one. 

After I'd hopped into the garage and crashed onto a bean bag -- and been attended to by everyone in my family, the children hovering without being able to do much -- it seemed obvious that I'd stay there and watch movies on the projector. Of course I would. 

Wouldn't you know it, in the first 15 minutes of the first movie -- Lean on Pete, watched on Kanopy -- there is a reference to the lead character being given the right boots to work with the titular horse, so he doesn't lose a toe.

Heh.

I'm not really here to tell you about the "movie marathon" that followed, but since I did take Monday off work and watched four movies on the projector that day, I might as well briefly touch on each.

Lean on Pete

This came out the same year as Chloe Zhao's The Rider, which made my top ten of that year. I think I assumed it was a lesser version of The Rider and not worthy of my attentions, though obviously I did want to see it as it's been in my Kanopy watchlist for some time. Well, I'm really glad I saw it as it is another proof of the filmmaking abilities of Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years). I was hugely invested in this story of a teenager from a broken home whose story undergoes numerous twists and turns, all of which feel like a direct outgrowth of his environment and the very real difficulties of Americans near the poverty line. It was also a well-timed viewing since the Melbourne Cup was just run on Tuesday, the day I lost that toenail, so I had horse racing on the brain.

Old Dads 

I'd been bemoaning the lack of really bad movies I've seen so far in 2023. It's been the year of the mediocre. For maybe the first half of Bill Burr's film, in which he's the star as well as the writer and director, I thought I had a new contender for my worst of the year. It's one of those films where every joke is at the expense of a sensitive liberal whose behavior is exaggerated to make them a PC monster. Lots of disdainful discussions of privilege and pronouns. As the film went, I upgraded my assessment from hating it to disliking it, since the old dads do learn their lesson and some of the rougher edges are sanded off the PC monsters. But I expected a lot better from a comedian who has found a niche that I enjoy. (He's like Joe Pantoliano if Joe Pantoliano were funnier.)

After these two movies, this is when we finally went to the hospital. 

Deathgasm

Now I'm cheating a little bit since this movie was actually watched on our living room couch rather than on the projector. This was a suggestion by my wife, and when you are a medical patient and relying on someone who's catering to your needs, it's a good idea to heed their suggestions. I was going to be sleeping there to elevate my foot before my x-rays the next morning, so watching the movie there was probably also the right call. Anyway, this is a New Zealand film from 2015 about heavy metal music turning the residents of a small New Zealand town into zombies. Had a lot of fun with Jason Lei Howden's film, which feels inspired by the works of fellow countryman Peter Jackson.

I returned from the doctor around 10 a.m. on Monday, at which point I had already decided I was going to take the day as a sick day. So after a highly unusual two-hour (!) nap, I continued with my movies.

Reptile

One of the high-profile Netflix releases from around a month ago that had been eluding me. I really enjoyed the depth this movie has the chance to reach by running well over two hours, which made me feel like this world was very lived in. In what essentially amounts to a whodunnit, the script smartly sprinkles around potential suspects without you knowing which ones will be the red herrings. I really enjoyed Benicio del Toro in the lead role. However, my affection for the film has subsequently dimmed a little when a friend challenged me to try to remember the plot a week from now. He's got a point there, though the plot is rarely the thing that connects most with me about any movie. I'm probably more interested in performance and character and things I haven't seen before, and this movie did have some of that.

Joy Ride

After two false starts that both seemed too challenging for a sick day, I went with the 2001 Joy Ride directed by John Dahl, not the 2023 Joy Ride directed by Adele Lim, which I have also seen. This was one of those 90s thrillers (released just after the 1990s) that had the chance to be indistinguishable from two dozen other similar films, but I'd always had a soft spot for it. I'd seen it just the once, and of course I had to figure out if it held up. The appealing cast (Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, Leelee Sobieski) still worked on me, though I found the actual story to be a bit more preposterous than I remembered. The central antagonist is a truck driver with the ability to be everywhere at once like the most far-fetched serial killer, as well as setting up elaborate plans that similarly defy spatial logistics. I did enjoy it well enough and it went by quickly enough.

Pearl

As this has recently come to Netflix, I finally overcome some unspecified bias against it and threw on the prequel to Ti West's X. And was astounded. Not only did I like it a whole lot better than X, but I also found it to be completely different, barely even needing to be the same character and containing only a few Easter eggs for X. Mia Goth gives a truly committed performance that is all over the map between sympathetic and sociopathic. I just realized that "all over the map" is usually a phrase of criticism, but the wide-ranging aspect of her performance was key to the success of this movie. Big win here for West. 

And finally to lighten up a dour afternoon of murder and gore ...

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

My fourth time watching Walk Hard -- has it been that few? -- was as good as any of the others. In fact, I feel like I may have laughed harder in certain spots than I had on previous occasions. So many bits in this just land perfectly. I think we will look back on this as one of the great comedies of the early 21st century. It's just sad that some of its frames of reference are becoming too ancient to resonate with a young audience today, though I'd hope that some of these jokes would work for a younger audience even out of context. Can't show it to my kids yet, though, as it's still too adult (in all the funniest ways). Oh and I guess if I really wanted to get away from the gore, I shouldn't have watched a movie where a young boy cuts his brother in half with a machete in the first ten minutes.

Heal, toe.