You get the impression that Osgood Perkins’ nightmare ride, LONGLEGS, is Silence of the Lambs as David Lynch may have made it.
Here we have a female FBI agent, Lee Harker, on the trail of a serial killer who seems to pull off locked room slaughters while leaving notes with his signature coded messages.
Whole families are butchered, killings which occur on the fourteenth day of the month or six days either side. And each of the massacres appear to be murder suicides perpetrated by the patriarch of the family.
A chilling pre title sequence is a mini masterpiece of sinister foreboding, featuring a secluded snow bound house, a young girl alone and the arrival of an ominous vehicle.
After a grindhouse red title card, we are introduced to Lee Harker, showing an uncanny level of intuition on her first day on the job. Where, rightly, she should have been counselled after the traumatic proceedings of that day, she is catapulted into the cold cases perpetrated by the elusive Longlegs. Her near psychic ability may shine some light on these decades long dark deeds.
Perkins describes his film as a mix tape horror movie. “This movie really does have kind of everything in it when it comes to the expectations of the genre. There’s an axe massacre. There’s a serial killer. There’s the devil. There’s the FBI. There’s creepy dolls. There’s creepy barns. So it really has this kind of milkshake quality to it of having everything in it.”
And that milkshake is certainly not vanilla.
Nicholas Cage as the titular Longlegs presents as a macabre mix of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Joker and Beetlejuice, another insane and iconic characterisation to add to his astonishing array of performance choices.
Maika Monroe is superb as Harker, an introvert obsessed with puzzles; perceptive, intuitive, but someone who sucks at social skills.
T Rex’s classic Get It On plays at the end of the film and a lyric line is quoted at the beginning – “You’re dirty, sweet, and you’re my girl.”
And like that song’s last lyric line, regarding LONGLEGS, “for a meanwhile I’m still thinking.”
