Skip to main content

Blackcoat's Daughter/Longlegs -- a review

Osgood Perkins is the eldest son of actor Anthony Perkins, who was best known for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, Psycho. Osgood Perkins would make his acting debut as a twelve year old Norman within a flashback sequence in 1983’s Psycho II. After writing several screenplays, Osgood Perkins made his directorial debut (also writing the script) in 2015 with The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a mesmerizing horror film that wound up being an elegant, if horrifying, twist on The Exorcist.

Original, imaginative, and deeply disturbing, The Blackcoat’s Daughter contains images that are truly chilling. It’s a hard film to talk about without giving away a major plot point, so I won’t, but it’s highly recommended. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a darkly brilliant horror film with some great performances by its entire cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Lauren Holly, and James Remar. It’s also one of the most coldest films ever made--by taking place in the dead of winter in upstate New York. And it’s also a very cold film in its deadpan depictions of horror and violence.

Osgood Perkins returned as a director this year with Longlegs. Maika Monroe, from It Follows, stars as a young FBI agent named Lee Harker, who starts showing signs of clairvoyance. Instead of being dumped in a backwater field office, she’s given tests by the FBI, who want to see just how good her talents are. She must have impressed her superiors, because Lee is assigned to a case of several murder-suicides of families by her supervisor (the always sturdy Blair Underwood). Each family was murdered by the father, who then killed himself.

But what’s really strange is that there are these creepy notes left at the scene of each crime, written in a form of Satanic code, with the handwriting not belonging to any of the victims. They are all signed by someone called Longlegs. Taking place in the early 1990s, Longlegs has a stark, chilly feel to its cinematography. Maika Monroe gives another standout performance as Lee Harker, who begins to feel as if she’s in over her head as signs of the supernatural begin to appear.

While Longlegs was very good, it wasn't as good as The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Perkins’ first film as a director was his masterpiece; it was a true tour de force in filmmaking. And while Longlegs was good, and chilling in its own way, it had some problems. The main one being Nicolas Cage, who plays Longlegs in such a gonzo manner that he feels like he’s in a completely different movie. Longlegs works better when it’s an understated thriller film that builds up its dread slowly.

But then Cage appears, and his over the top performance is so screechy and bizarre that it breaks the delicate build up of terror that the film was going for. Instead of dreading him, I was staring at Longlegs in disbelief and wondering: WTF is going on, here? Still, Longlegs is worth watching just for Maika Monroe’s performance alone. Perkins states in the 'making of' documentary that he’s a huge fan of The Silence of the Lambs, and it shows in Maika Monroe’s stead-fast, honorable Lee Harker. Longlegs also fondly recalls for me some of the scarier serial killer episodes of The X-Files, as well. So, despite its flaws, Longlegs still has its merits, and I happily look forward to whatever Osgood Perkins has in store for us. --SF

Both The Blackcoat's Daughter and Longlegs are available on physical media.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa...
Post a Comment
Read more

3 Body Problem

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Holdovers -- a review

It’s always a joy to watch someone who’s a master at their work, whether it’s a musician, an artist, or an actor. Most great actors make it look easy--which is not to say that I think acting is an easy job. I know from personal experience that acting is very hard. It’s a skill that the talented make look very easy, and one of the most talented actors working today is Paul Giamatti. If you’ve watched some movies over the past few years, chances are very good that you’ve already seen Paul Giamatti. He was the jittery earthquake expert in San Andreas , the sympathetic police chief in The Illusionist , and as the titular John Adams (a part that got him the Emmy and a Golden Globe) in the 2008 HBO series of the same name. Recently, I saw Paul Giamatti in the superb The Holdovers , a movie that I wasn’t planning on writing up, but I kept thinking about it--and all of its characters--long after I saw it. In The Holdovers , Giamatti plays Paul H...
Post a Comment
Read more