Oz Perkins
Longlegs

Much ado not exactly about nothing but…

All smoke, no fire? Well yes, this barbecue could have been more loaded.

Not that there isn't any fire. Take the powerful opening, Longlegs in the snow, the little girl, the black opening titles on a blood-red background. It starts off well, promises much, more than it delivers.

The general setup is good and there are various moments, sequences, sudden jump scares, several interesting ideas.

Maybe it was the buzz before its release, the advertising frenzy, that made Longlegs a potential phenomenon, almost a cult movie, raising expectations. Expectations partly disappointed by a subject original in construction, but cliché in development (the devil, evil-blablabla).

I wasn't even crazy about the character of Longlegs played by Nicholas Cage. There's no doubt it's an interesting character, a remarkable make-up job… but do you know if they filled his face with makeup or did he badly inject botox into his face? He even has a French nose and womanly plump lips (??) … a character too over the top, reminded me of those in the Firefly family by Rob Zombie: House of 1000 Corpses – The Devil's Rejects (what terrible Italian titles) which were, in my opinion, more focused and credible.

In short, we have a serial killer who wipes out entire families, a dozen over the course of thirty long years… but not only is he elusive, he barely gets his hands dirty, these families die horribly and he hardly lifts a finger.

The plot and development, as I mentioned earlier, are potentially interesting but, I repeat, when I found out that the devil was behind it, my enthusiasm deflated.

Perkins Jr. deserves credit for a good craft in genre cinema; you can tell he is someone who studied and studied well. He draws wisely from the horror panorama, creating tension, with the help of a changing soundtrack, coherent with the sequences, with brutal murders and blood flowing in abundance. With remarkable angles, symmetrical, studied, see the shots of the snowy landscape, the huts, the bare trees, really good work.

It's a pity because it could have been a cult thriller, on par or almost with a Silence of the Lambs (even in Longlegs there's an almost symbiotic relationship between the killer and the young policewoman) but Clarence and Hannibal eat Longlegs and Company alive. Instead, it ends up being little more than an exercise in style (a bit like my reviews soaked in pulp style and assorted fluff), a pity because with a more compact story and a more 'elevated' performance it could have been the bomb it promised to be. Adding in that I watched it at the cinema but in Italian (how dreadful) and the circle is complete.

However, I'm not failing it eh? Longlegs isn't bad, it's just that I expected an 8 and they served me a 6 and a half.