Longlegs

 Ten families butchered over two decades, each a clear case of the one of the parents snapping and killing the rest. But here's the thing: in each one of the murder scenes there's a letter written in code, signed as LONGLEGS.

 FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a cripplingly shy and socially awkward FBI agent, is assigned to the case. Her gregarious superior (Blair Underwood), hopes her unnatural intuition can help shed some light when Longlegs strikes again.

 His hopes prove founded: with a little help from an unexpected Longlegs letter and a hilariously '70s guide to satanism, Agent Harker cracks the code and finds a new element to the murders that only muddles things further... unless you're willing (as Harker is) to indulge in supernatural explanations.

 Longlegs is the latest film from writer/director Osgood Perkins, one of the most fiercely idiosyncratic  genre directors working in horror today - and for better and for worse, this movie is an excellent showcase for his talents. It's a deeply grim, unsettling film, a creepy exercise in growing ambient dread that's expertly ratcheted up until it threatens to drown everything. The direction is precise and the shots often starkly beautiful, with a cohesive palette that alternates between deep earthy colours and chilly bone-white tableaus. Just from a visual and aural standpoint, the film is a marvel.

 But the script tries to juggle a little too much, and some of the elements are a little suspect. Chief amongst them Longlegs himself, Nicholas Cage in a fright wig and grotesque pancake makeup - Cage's talents are numerous, but there's a little miscalculation to how much weirdness he's allowed to indulge in here, his histrionics effectively creepy but too ridiculous for the film's otherwise tightly controlled tone. I think I get what Perkins and Cage were going for (a screeching injection of white noise into the film's more subdued static drone),  but it didn't really work for me.

 I did like the fact that the killer's into T. Rex and Lou Reed. Giving heavy metal a little time off to relax. And Cage does seem to be having a blast.

 Equally problematic is that the film is a little bit disjointed. Each one of the fairly well worn horror and serial killer movie tropes it brings into play are immaculately well crafted, but they end up clashing against each other once it becomes clear how they're supposed to slot in together. The film shines in its first two acts, and while there's a lot to like in the last one, it is more than a little bit clunky and nonsensical.

 Another problem is the film's stylish marketing campaign, a beautifully put together series of mysterious, gorgeously edited trailers which stands in contrast to the terrible, crass job trailers have been doing to promote their respective films for a couple of decades now. It's a petty thing to hold against the movie, not to mention my own damn fault - the slight disappointment of being overhyped - but there you go. For what it's worth, the film was never misrepresented by the trailers, and I suspect they'll prove influential.
 Oh, and please ignore any comparisons to Silence of the Lambs; That type of hyperbole will never do a movie any favours.

 For all my reservations and the time I've spent on them, I really like this movie. It's of a piece with other jagged, retro-tinged mood pieces, artifacts from a 70s experimental horror subgenre that never was. Osgood Perkins and his crew have made something that's pretty special, and I hope its success allows the director to pursue his batshit, uncommercial vision as far as he's willing to take it.

The Guest

 Before writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard completely missed the point of The Blair Witch Project and moved on to make a couple of silly american Kaiju movies, they put out a couple of pretty cool horror movies and early contributions to the V/H/S series. Out of all of them my favorite is 2014's The Guest, which sort of straddles the line between their nastier slasher films and the more over-the-top stuff that followed by way of a pastiche of gritty, mid-budget '80s genre stuff.

 As a homage, it's an unqualified success - it really feels like a relic from that time, to the point where it's a bit jarring when someone pulls out a laptop to burn a CD mixtape (which is already a time capsule in its own right; Ugh, I feel old). But the movie's neatest trick is that it wrangles all of its influences to power a really fun, knowingly silly story played (at least until the very final line) with a completely straight face.

 The Petersons - particularly mom (Sheila Kelley) and dad (Leland Orser) - are still mourning their son Caleb, lost in combat somewhere the Middle East.
 Enter David Collins (Dan Stevens), who pops up unannounced on their front door one fine summer day; David was a friend of Caleb's in the army, and he's following up on a promise to check in on his family.

 Mom is immediately won over and invites him to stay over a few days as a houseguest. Dad takes a tiny bit more convincing, but David proves so effortlessly charming that he's soon confiding his office troubles with him over drinks.

 Luke, the troubled son (Brendan Meyer), takes to him quickly - especially after he beats up his high-school bullies in a hilarious, brutal bar brawl. That leaves Anna (Maika Monroe), the adult daughter, who tries to be wary of him for a while... and is soon making him that mixtape CD I mentioned earlier.

 And it makes sense; David has the larger-than-life looks and charisma of Dan Stevens. But as soon as no one's around, he switches off and stares off into the distance. It's a brilliant, funny portrayal of sociopathy, and the first time I watched it all those years ago it had me wondering if the movie was going to go into sci-fi (think: The Terminator) territory. Not quite... but almost.

 The movie is nearly half-done before David kills some people on-screen, and the movie brilliantly keeps his motivations and plan fuzzy for a while longer. It's a moot point, anyhow, as when the military find out where he is and send a team of mercenaries headed by the great, late Lance Reddick, those plans are scuppered. The movie briefly shifts gears from thriller into action territory, before settling in for a more intimate, blood-soaked finale which, OK, does pay its respects to Cameron.

 It's a brilliant mish-mash, totally convincing under any of the disguises it dons. The thriller aspects are suitably outrageous (love David's sage counsel to Luke), and the action is meaty and knows to show the casings from a light machinegun bouncing in slow motion on the dusty floor; Incidentally, I really miss when low-ish-budget stuff like this could still use explosives to depict bullet hits on a house and not CGI sparks and weak-ass dust puffs.

 The cinematography (by Robby Baumgartner)is great and unshowy, and the script manages to get a few interesting locations. The acting's really good across the board, with Stevens and Monroe stealing the show.

 The film's secret weapon is the soundtrack - excellent synth-driven original music from Steve Moore, and a bunch of goth and goth-adjacent rock from the 80s, which do as good a job at positioning the movie as the plot devices and unfussy action; it's set in a version of the modern world in which young people really seem to be into Front 242, and Anna can be a fan of Clan of Ximox, Sisters of Mercy and Love and Rockets. A key scene is scored to the opening of Clan of Ximox's A Day, which is about as cool a music choice as you can make.

 Unlike most of the nostalgia-fuelled films of the last couple of decades, The Guest feels more like it could sit comfortably among its influences rather than just stare at them from a distance; I've filed it away in my mind next to The Hitcher, in all its (Roy?) batty glory. And that's really high praise, dammit!

Significant Other

 Significant Other is an uninteresting pod people sci-fi suspense film, the sort that's kind of hard to write about because it's so mild that it's hard to squeeze anything interesting out of it.

 We get a falling meteor on the very first scene. That's a bad sign, since we know meteors are never up to any good. Unless they're carrying a superman, but this is not that type of movie.

 Soon afterwards Harry (Jake Lacy) and Ruth (Maika Monroe) venture into the national park the where the meteorite lies. Harry's trying to push Ruth out of her comfort zone, as she seems to have some hiking-related phobia (ambulasilvaphobia?). Harry's a paternalistic dick, though at least he seems to be well-meaning, I guess.

 The characters are one of the movie's main problems, as despite Ruth's anxieties (she has a couple panic attacks) both of them are uninteresting and their dialog is pretty drab. Even worse, they pretty much lack any discernible chemistry; Ruth only seems to tolerate Harry - and it's not even as if the movie can mine that pathos, since it's really hard to root for the guy. There's not much reason to care for whatever happens to either of them or to their (kind of unhealthy) relationship.

 In any case, all that is rendered a moot point because soon there's a creepy deer stalking them, looking at them funny. Then Ruth wanders into the woods, and when Harry finally finds her she's acting all weird. I'm going to try and avoid spoilers, but it's going to be hard to speak about the movie without giving away its only interesting thing going on here, so if for some reason you want to watch this... well, skip to after the picture.

 There's a decent twist which relies on the movie being selective on how it presents events (not to mention a big ask of suspended disbelief), but at least it's kind of a neat play on expectations. From there on we've got an alien doppelganger thing chasing their subsumed identity's lover across the woods, with a statistically ridiculous chance encounter with some fellow hikers to get a body count and a piss-poor attempt at twisting the body snatcher formula to give the movie a new-ish wrinkle.

 Writing/directing team Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (who previously did the way more lively Villains) keep things moving and looking professional, and the woodland backdrop is lovely (often shown in drone shots, with ominous music; cinematography: Matt Mitchell). And for whatever it's worth, on a moment-to-moment basis the film's not terrible, just... well, kind of meh. With some pretty bad moments strewn in.
 There's some blood - scratch that, there's no blood, but there's some gore, which is fairly rare. The aliens in this movie have a weapon that performs a type of amputation I abhor, the sort of where you can see the cut organs with the precision of a medical textbook, but there's no blood anywhere. I can give it the benefit of doubt and say it's down to the blade's extraterrestrial properties... but it still looks pretty bad, so why not add in any oozing/jetting blood or even better, something weirder?

 As for the science fiction trappings - well, expecting any sort of scientific rigour or neat ideas out of a movie where people keep magically finding each other or whatever they need in the middle of a huge wilderness might be too big an ask. This is strictly a creature feature.

 

 There's a ploy to kill the alien which is almost respectable in its stupidity, and a few over the top moments which hint at a more fun picture hiding somewhere in there; Unfortunately most of the movie is fairly dumb and extremely staid, and that's a terrible combination.