Longlegs (2024)

(Director: Osgood Perkins, who is also the sole accredited writer. You have been warned).

Long Legs is so terrible that we advise against seeing it (if you value your time, money and/or pride).

SPOILER ALERT

In case there are any readers who might be considering seeing it, we will help dissuade you by posting some spoilers.  And, perhaps some of you who have watched this rubbish could help us out with some of our queries.    It starts off well enough – don’t all horror films?  Perkins has just enough talent to do one good scene.  Small girl, curiously alone in curiously isolated Oregon house, is confronted by a weird clown guy*.  There’s a figure in black in a car in the driveway. Is the car her family’s or the weird clown guy’s? The weird clown guy is Nicolas Cage in a Witchy-Poo mask and a lot of white makeup, looking and acting every bit as stupid as Joachim Phoenix in Joker.

Cut to rookie FBI agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who is wooden and socially awkward**, but has “half-psychic abilities”*** according to some obviously meaningless testing. You know the type, where the bewildered young person has to watch slides in a dark room**** and give answers to a disembodied voice#, the type of testing where the examinee turns to see behind the projector but can’t because of all the dust motes in the light@?  This rookie and her arrogant male partner go looking for some serial killer called Longlegs who kills families somehow without being present. Sexist boy cop gets shot in the face because he didn’t listen to psychic girl.

Is the zombie-like rookie our kid from before, now all grown up?  Of course she is.  Is Longlegs the clown guy from before?  Of course he is?  Why is he called Longlegs when his legs are the same length as Nicholas Cage’s ordinary-length legs?  Is agent Harker all retardo because of something clown guy did to her?  Why does she live in a shed on the premises of her parents’ old house?  Why does she make peculiar phone calls to her mother?  Does she have a father?  Is Longlegs her father? How does he get into her house?  Why doesn’t she have curtains?  What is the meaning of some kids having 9th birthdays on the 14th of the month?  Why does Harker not tie her late-night crazy collage together with red string, like a normal cliché-obsessive cop?  Why does it take so long to solve a simple substitution code?## Why, when she is poking about, holding a gun in shaking hands, doing her best Clarice Starling, is Harker’s scared breathing mixed up to 11 on the volume scale?@@

Don’t ask, because you will never know.  Nor will you know why Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) is getting around in a nun’s outfit, doing bad things, or why Nicholas Cage is called “The Toymaker” and is allowed to wear a disguise even while being questioned by the FBI.  What’s with the creepy life-size doll that controls people, even though all it contains is an empty metal ball? Why didn’t the one, solo writer predict that some viewers might work out that the the sweet family (including a daughter who is about to turn 9 on the you-guessed- it) of Harker’s super-nice black supervisor (Blair Underwood) will become victims? Is any of this happening?

We were so confused that we turned to Wikipedia, which asserts “Longlegs has lived in the Harker basement, creating satanic dolls that Ruth, posing as a nun, delivered to families, causing them to kill each other.  Lee’s doll blocked her memories of Longlegs while influencing her with her magic”.  Of course. Now it makes sense.

This is an awful film. Apart from its incoherence and stupidity, it is has that worst quality common to all terrible films: It is boring.

[Editor’s note: Oh dear, Oz. What would your Dad have made of this, despite the fatuous praise being sung about it? For amateur productions with a horror aspect, try The Blair Witch Project.]

Notes

[*It

**The Silence of the Lambs

***Séance on a Wet Afternoon

**** The Game

# Scream

@ Citizen Kane

## Zodiac

@@ Alien]