Just the Ticket #196: Longlegs

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

I didn't originally have this movie planned into the October schedule, but as I was going through my content library to figure out what 2026 will look like, I stumbled across Longlegs and went, "oh, shit; I've been meaning to watch that so I can finally learn what MovieBob was talking about" (review, spoilers), and because it's allegedly a horror movie and daddy longlegs is a kind of spider and Halloween is coming up, "guess I'd better watch this now."

Directed by Osgood Perkins (son of Norman Bates actor Anthony Perkins) and starring Maika Monroe (adding to her bad movie résumé after It Follows and Independence Day: Resurgence), Blair Underwood (whom I last saw in an Elsbeth episode that I thought was a Poker Face episode), Alicia Witt (next week's Urban Legend) reminding me how old I am by playing Monroe's religious fanatic mother, and Nicolas Cage (Renfield and Willy's Wonderland) with an entire box of melted candles on his face, Longlegs feels like a Coen Brothers approximation of bad A24 psychological horror, in that it looks amazing and ends brutally and anticlimactically after not doing or saying much of consequence with its runtime.

What little plot there is isn't even that original, as it follows (puns!) FBI Agent Lee Harker (Monroe, whose character name misled me to believe that I was about to watch To Kill A Mockingbird with vampires, which sounds awesome), who is just Clarice Starling with Angelina Jolie's psychic powers from Taking Lives. She's been assigned to the unsolved case of the Longlegs Killer (Cage, whose metaphorical acting door is unhinged and whose breath reeks of ham and scenery if you can get past the albino Goosebumps mask on his face that passes for old age makeup), whom, because of Satanic voodoo amnesia, she forgot that she survived an encounter with as a child...somehow. Also he's a Zodiac knockoff who has a personal interest in Harker because the movie's title is a reference to antiquated slang born of an old Fred Astaire musical about a millionaire (which used to mean something in those days) who adopts an orphan and gives her the Pretty Woman treatment so he can get it up when she turns legal in two years...but now we just call it grooming, pedophilia, and sex crimes, regardless of the level of Satanic influence at play. Which, there's gotta be some prince-class sorcery going on (there are multiple centuries of non-pop culture literature on demon ranking, most of which conflict on all sorts of details because we human animals are the true evil, but I settled on prince as the top rank for how often it was agreed upon among sources) for the country I inhabit to be in the state it's in, right?

Despite Cage going "Full Cage" and Perkins being an incredibly artful director (who apparently cited his own family dynamic—with emphasis on how they addressed his father's repressed sexual orientation—as inspiration for the film, and I kind of get it from a surface level, I guess), Longlegs was still a boring, overrated, underwhelming, bad movie before I learned of this titular allusion or the director's personal inspiration.

The film relies too heavily on "establishing shot, slow closeup, OMG SUDDENLY BAD GUY!" jumpscares early on, Harker's "psychic powers, but maybe it's just the killer puppeteering her into a prestigious life" thing manages to simultaneously sap all mystery and tension from the plot, riddles it with holes, and devalues her as a main character, Longlegs the character kills himself at the end of the second act (so, we must endure twenty more minutes without Cage onscreen to liven up this predictable, uneventful slog of a pretentious crime thriller), and the finale was so shock-focused and obviously foreshadowed (at least, as far as the setting and characters are concerned) that any expectations I attempted to have of Longlegs having a point or being cool felt like a vain waste of my time and emotions. Longlegs is the Ralph Bohner of horror movies, and its eponymous allusions land somewhere between socially repugnant and "who was this even made for?"

Not even reversing the credit roll was enough to earn Longlegs a hubcap diamond star halo. Dirty. Sour. Not my movie.

D-

Ticketmaster's Note: I've clearly gotten off track and anxious already despite my immaculate planning and tenacity spanning, as evidenced by my shoehorning this review into said plan. I have to admit here that my anxiety led to me bingeing an anime (that I'm not even going to review until the week after Christmas, assuming it concludes by then) that ends up tackling...similar, Acrobatic subject matter in an anti-epicurean fashion, let's say. And that recency bias definitely affected the tone of the above review, though, as I said, I only learned what the title was referring to after I watched Longlegs, and my opinions of the movie itself stand on their own.

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Ticketmaster,

Bang A Gong,

Get It On.