Sweet, sweet validation

I have been carrying a (relatively) lonesome burden in the past six weeks regarding how much I disliked one of the year's bigger word-of-mouth hits, Oz Perkins' Longlegs.

I wrote about it here, but my snide remarks were part of a bigger consideration of the bait-and-switch it shared with its partner for a double feature I saw that week, MaXXXine, both of which purport to be horror movies but are really more serial killer movies.

But at that time, I hadn't even published my 1/10 review of it on ReelGood. I can now point you to that review if you want to dig deeper into the choice words I had about it. 

There were a few others who joined in my distaste for the movie. My oldest friend, who used to comment here as Don Handsome but has (rightfully) put blogs in his rearview mirror, greeted the mere news that I had seen the movie -- I wasn't going to tell him my thoughts in case he hadn't seen it -- with the single comment "Boo," and we went from there. His partner disliked it equally. And then there's the estimable but slightly risible critic Rex Reed, whose 0 rating on Metacritic stood in stark contrast to the next lowest one they saw it fit to feature on the film's main page, a 63. The others were 75, 80, 80, 90 and 100. 

Those scores of 75, 80, 80, 90 and 100 were the things that made me secretly worry that Rex and Don and I might be idiots. We knew how terrible the thing we saw was, but if you hate something that everyone else loves, maybe it's you, right?

Well this was a good week in the journey of my dislike for Longlegs. 

It started with one of the other ReelGood critics finally seeing it -- a horror aficionado at that. Here was what he thought:

"Wouldn't go as low as 1, but it wasn't great."

Now you get a SPOILER ALERT for the rest of his comments:

"Just crazy how many different elements he threw in there. Psychic detective, haunted dolls, Satanism.

"Not sure if it was meant to be a bit ridiculous or he just had no idea what he was doing."

Bingo!

That gave me some comfort, but it did not quite give me the sweet, sweet validation I spoke of in the subject of this post.

I had seen that a discussion of Longlegs was coming up on The Slate Culture Gabfest, catching up as I have been from many months behind, now to only about a month behind. I was a bit worried about the prospective positive tenor of this podcast, though, given the episode title: "Longlegs has legs."

As it turned out, this title was nothing more than a statement of fact: The movie had become a word-of-mouth phenomenon and was making far more money than most movies of its basic components make, effectively burrowing into the zeitgeist.

It was not a statement about their appreciation of the film.

In fact, I am not sure if I have ever heard these three people -- who have discussed hundreds of movies in the ten years I have been listening to them on this podcast -- so lambast a film.

The two women, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner, were a bit measured in their albeit clear disappointment with the film. Perhaps it was their "feminine sense of empathy" that compelled them to point out things they thought were good; in one case, quite wrongly, the performance of Nicolas Cage.

Stephen Metcalf? He was howling with how preposterous the whole thing was. 

A grin split my face in two as I was walking home from the train station, listening to an increasingly giddy takedown of the movie. Steve's sheer delight with how bad the movie was quickly won the other two over.

But wait there's more.

I don't know if you are a Slate Plus member, dear reader, but if you are not, it might be worth signing up just to hear the BONUS EPISODE they recorded in which they could continue to trash the movie, only with spoilers. Especially if you are a Longlegs hater like I am. 

We're not talking about a full hour of content, but rather, each regular episode of the Gabfest includes a bonus fourth segment, after their weekly endorsements, that is only for Slate Plus subscribers. It runs about 17 minutes, or did in this case anyway.

And those 17 minutes were devoted to tearing the movie to shreds with the freedom not to censor themselves to avoid spoilers.

It's exquisitely entertaining listening, and it has put a spring in my step for the 48 hours since I listened to it.

So look, you might have come to this post because it's about Longlegs and you liked Longlegs. I'm sorry that you had this clearly incorrect experience with the movie, but at least you are in the majority. Maybe it's me.

Or maybe it's me, my friend Don, Don's partner, Rex Reed, my ReelGood critic, and Dana, Julia and Steve. 

One day, maybe everyone will realize what a turd this movie is. 

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.