"Longlegs" - Review

Promising FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is plucked from a pool of newcomers to aid in the investigation of a serial killer on a decades long spree who murders entire families, seemingly never entering the house, and leaving only a cryptic note at every crime signed "Longlegs". Harker begins discovering a deeply rooted, horrifying evil which threatens not just her life, but her very soul...

Absolutely fucking terrifying. Beginning like a clawing at the back of the skull thanks to excellent sound design and experimental, stripped down music, the film has an eye for detailed staging which makes the Midwest look stark, bleak, empty and nightmarish. It's like listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" - a quaint little place, homely yet peppered with a dusting of snow (this is a Christmas film!) and festering beneath with evil, like a rot, like peeling paint exposing a vile monstrous corruption. It slithers and snakes its way into your mind in a serpentine creep beneath your flesh, lingering on stunning and stark and frightening imagery throughout.
I cannot praise it enough. The classic police procedural detective story is the framework, and will easily draw comparisons to "Seven" and "Silence of the Lambs", well earned. About 40 minutes in I realised that I had cut off blood flow to my hand and thigh from gripping them absent mindedly.
The opening shots in a 4 by 3 aspect ratio are in the style of a projector slide of home movies, adding to the sinister "kitchen sink horror" they're aiming for. When Agent Harker explores a suburban street, the houses are reminiscent of churches... The strongest parts are the simple pieces of imagery: Harker looks up in the library from her studies, and there is nobody there; Harker spreads out her work on the floor to study it, and it is evocative of a summoning circle. Its setting is the early 90s, but even more timely now: the Satanic panic and dread of the Reagan years are in the rear view mirror and we're entering a hopeful new age, but that rot creeps back in, having lingered for new age: Harker sits in front of her supportive boss as he talks through their work, and the portrait of Bill Clinton lingers above him, leering down at them...
Its edits and transitions continue the serpentine, insidious comparisons and thematic emblems, whilst the staging and sets and shot composition will burn themselves into your brain (there's a reason that the poster is so striking, and is indeed in the film proper!) - check out the agents entering the barn, made up like a belly of a beast...
Refreshingly, the movie also has been keeping its trump card close to its chest. Maika Monroe is fantastic as always (want your horror movie to be good? Just put her in the lead. "It Follows" is one of my favourite movies of all time, "Watcher" was fabulous, "The Guest" fucking rules), but Nicolas Cage? Exceptional.
Granted I'm biased: the man is the greatest living actor. I've seen pushback to his performance, and without spoiling all I will say is:
You all loved Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight".
He's an unhinged toxic, festering nightmare of a man, ghoulish pallid and corpse-like, certainly nothing to forget anytime soon.
I absolutely adored this movie, and unusually for a horror movie it pulls it out of the bag and goes stratospheric with its ending: a soaring, terrifyingly ambiguous, all too fitting coda to this horrible dream.
Fuck. Yes.

"Maxxxine" - Review

Six years after a massacre at a farm killing best girl and leaving her the only survivor, Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), is attempting to break out of the pornographic film industry and make it into mainstream fare. She has landed a leading role in horror movie "Puritan II" directed by visionary English director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki, always welcome), has a supportive agent in Teddy Knight (Giancarlo Esposito) and seems to be making the best of what life has given her, not settling for a life she does not deserve. But when a private investigator named John Labat (Kevin Bacon) comes sniffing around, upturning her life and making insinuations, things start to go South. And all of this falls against the backdrop of a Puritanical push against pornography and horror, the killing spree of The Night Stalker, and 80s excess...

"X" was a fantastic surprise and homage to horror films gone by, and Hollywood finally learned what I have known and been proselytising since the late 2000s: Ti West is great. It got more people (my partner included) to know who the hell he is ("Innkeepers" is good, "The Sacrament" fantastic, his sequel to "Cabin Fever" far outdoes the original film, and "House of the Devil" is an absolute fucking barnburner and easily his best work) and "Pearl", whilst weaker than "X" in my eyes, is a strong companion piece and ode to envy and the Hollywood Golden era. This movie attempts to mash the two together: the strong character work of "Pearl", the horror and sex of "X" and the Hollywood blending of both.
There are some amazing shots to this effect: the most striking image is of Kevin Bacon in a nightclub chasing after Maxine, lights flashing chaotically and brightly, like things are shot in slower shutter speed and a nightmarish vision of the sequence in "Fright Night". The opening manages to contrast what people THINK the 80s was with the grimy nastiness and terrible parts it actually was. The house from "Psycho" is used for a sequence, and Debicki drolly remarks that "they made a sequel, can you believe that?". Hah.
Bacon's character is dressed as Jack Nicholson from "Chinatown" and honestly steals the show, relishing the part and chewing both dialogue and scenery. Many of the supporting cast have similar fun: Lily Collins gets a scene as a working class Yorkshire girl actress who cannot even be bothered to remember her co-star's name, Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan have literal buddy cop adventures on the trail of the Night Stalker, and Giancarlo Esposito is refreshingly against type as "Teddy Knight: Hollywood Super Agent". The cast have fun with these parts.
But the film struggles with what it wants to say and be about. It has fun gore effects (an alleyway castration is particularly fine) and its reach attempts to juggle the censorship and hypocrisy of "Christian Values" and the links drawn between the worship of sex, violence and cinema, but it loses its core identity in the shuffle and struggle. Is it about Maxine getting her big break? Is it about fame corrupting? Is it about a woman trying to run from her past? Well the last act gives us some answer where it devolves into "No, it's about a scenery chewing serial killer (sorely missed honestly untilt his point, and yet rather out of place) trying to murder our lead". The film kills off several important characters off screen, seemingly in a "let's get this over with" drive, and tries to recapture the delirium of "Pearl" towards the end. I didn't dislike the film on the whole, but it is certainly the weakest of the trilogy. It will likely get some love from the "You Go Girl, Slay Queen" fandom, and may even drive people to the kinds of movies he clearly loved and attempts to evoke. But the entire exercise feels more akin to a tour through a video shop than a coherent, driven, passionate film. We have hints and glimpses of ambitious greatness, but it focuses on the wrong parts, and whilst it is admirable to have gone in the direction it did, he could have had more fun and better luck and results by embracing the "Video Nasty" style or hitting the beats of "Slasher Movie in the Big City" and playing it straight.
Ironically, West has been embraced by Hollywood in a tale of its excesses, but lost some of the joys which made him great, though he gets some mileage out of his big stars in parts normally played by quirky character actors. He even gets to hint at it a little, with a much-obliged and delightful cameo appearence from Larry Fessenden as a security guard. I appreciate him as a film maker and see this doing well with a queer horror crowd, but would prefer a return to his stripped back affairs.

"Kill" - Review

Indian commando Amrit (Lakshya) and his best friend with a moustache Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) are on a train to Delhi, alongside Amrit's secret new fiancee Tulika (Tanya Maiktala) and her family. Unfortunately, the train is boarded by an extended familu of boorish robbers led by Beni (Ashish Vidyarthi), and his sleazy nephew Fani (Raghav Juyal), and our sexy posing commando must battle through the confines of the train to save the day!

The simple description is "Bollywood The Raid", and honestly that concept/simple trailer (and the fact that it cuts straight to the quick by calling itself "Kill") was enough to get me on board. The fights have some of that brutal ferocity and confined mayhem of "The Raid", even if the editing is a little overtightened and the cuts a litle too fast in places, and the bloodwork is satisfying. There are some good kills and a particularly excellent fight involving the Moustache-Sporting Viresh on a bunk bed. All of it is filtered through the very "Extra" Bollywood lense, and an overdone melodramatic style, which honestly kind of works? The insanity and ever-escalting madness are punctuated by a soundtrack which features cocking of shotguns leading into dubstep, and the long, lingering shots of our handsome lead and his manly, bloody pecs are entertaining. It's swinging for the crowd seats with it all, never really reigning it in, and aiming for those emotional highs. Some work, some don't, but it is refreshingly sincere. It loses some momentum towards the end, especially after they gild the lily a little on the 2nd act twist, and whilst the bickering amongst the family does entertain at first, it is repeated too often. But despite the repetition (how many times are they going to capture Amrit and make demands? How many times does Viresh need to get stabbed in the same shoulder, whilst keeping that magnificent moustache squeaky clean?) the casual insanity on display makes this one of the most memorable movies of the year: our main character ends an entire fucking bloodline, and by the second act has become a slasher movie villain, and goes Super-Saiyan about 4 times. It's actually kind of incredible.
I want more visceral, gritty (to an extent, you can take the man out of Bollywood, but not the Bollywod out of the man) action movies like this. Not as good as "The Raid", but what is?

"The Watchers" - Review

Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American living in Ireland and working in a pet shop whilst hiding from her past, is tasked to deliver a parrot across the country. Along the way, she ends up lost in woods not on any map, and is forced to take refuge in a glass walled bunker alongside old professor Madeline (Olwen Fouere), nice English lady Ciara (Georgina Campbell, watch "Barbarian") and Irish scamp Daniel. Every night, something watches them, they don't know what, and it won't let them leave the woods...

Alright, here we go.
It's competently shot, nothing too spectacular or groundbreaking, and the imagery of the pet shop, glass and tanks (and the parrot too come to think of it) is all consistent enough without being overdone or out of place. It feels like a first feature, but none too shabby, there's polish here. I always am happy to see Georgina Campbell, and Dakota Fanning does well, I'm happy she's doing well.
Unfortunately I was completely checked out and bored by the whole affair. The atmosphere is never present, aided in no small part by a script which encourages obfuscation and vagueness on the part of the actors for no other reason than a forced drive for "Mystery" and "Mystique". The central casualties are not just the horror and atmosphere, but the mystery itself: there's no dread or build up or surprise to the revelation you know is coming, it's exactly who you think it is, and it is explained to death, yet with no point of reference or baseline to hold against the bizarre behaviour of the people in the bunker. The 3rd act entirely shits the bed, moving out of the woods and with more of the movie still to come: its entire 3rd act is relitigating, re-explaining and repeating a dull twist, which does nothing to recontextualise, and instead aims for a more fairy tale ending which falls flat.
Frustrating, but a companion piece to her father's work. I am curious as to how much of it comes down to the novel it is based on, and how much is the film making itself.