LONGLEGS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS???

"The scariest film of the decade". "A must-see". "Stunning". "Terrifying". "Masterpiece". "Masterpiece". "Masterpiece". Five stars, five stars. And I'm sitting there in Row D and thinking: are we watching the same film? In the way that I remember watching The Hangover with friends, on the same sofa in the same room at the same time and struggling to reconcile their laughter with my total lack of it, I'm currently struggling to understand how the rapturous raves fit with the definitely not "the scariest film of the decade" that I watched. Furthermore: in an effort to be scrupulously fair and to make sure I hadn't missed anything, I actually went back and saw it again, last night. And to be brutally honest: I haven't changed my mind at all.

Ah, the voices tell me, but you're a diehard horror enthusiast who's been watching horror movies on a regular basis for forty years now: you're immune to this stuff and your terror threshold is far higher than that of non-nerdy Real People. Nope: for one thing it's not as though I don't still get scared in modern movies sometimes: some of Blumhouse's ongoing Conjuring series and spinoffs have certainly done the job, for example. And for another, it's not like those above laudatory quotes were from My Little Pony Monthly or the review pages of a Cliff Richard fan magazine. They're from sites like Flickering Myth and Dread Central who, I think we can agree, know about horror. If they're getting that scared by Longlegs, why oh why aren't I?

There's certainly nothing wrong with the idea of making (yet) another FBI-vs-serial-killer movie: cinemas and video racks were full of them following on from The Silence Of The Lambs and they're usually a reliably enjoyable genre. It's 1995 (the prime era of The X-Files before it went off the rails) and rookie agent Maika Monroe is either highly intuitive or slightly psychic, so gets quickly assigned to a (surprisingly small) task force investigating a string of mysterious murder-suicides and coded messages left at the crime scenes. The clues, some of which are directed at Monroe specifically, lead to an incident in her own childhood and ultimately to Longlegs himself, a long-haired, whiny-voiced weirdo played by Nicolas Cage in a performance that makes his usual bug-eyed shouty freakouts look like Anthony Hopkins in The Remains Of The Day. But how and why is he doing it? And who's the man downstairs?

By far, by far, the scariest, creepiest, wrongest thing in Longlegs is the man himself. Cage has clearly been directed not just to turn it up to eleven, but to then turn that up to eleven, eleven times. The trouble is not only that, with his baffling choices regarding hair, make-up and apparel that immediately flag him as the most obviously suspicious man in the county (even the clerk in the local grocery recognises him as "that gross guy again"), but it overbalances the film and you're half-wanting Nic Cage to come back on screen and do his bonkers thing again, because there are few things in modern cinema more perversely enjoyable than watching this particular Academy Award winner go so completely off his medication. But that then forces the more interesting part of the film - the plot, the narrative - into the back seat.

But that's because this is very much Un Film De... and the stylistics and visuals of writer/director Oz (Osgood) Perkins just get in the way of the scares. Long, static shots, sometimes from unusual vantage points. Ambient, frequently non-musical music score (the Zilgi credited is actually Perkins' regular composer, his younger brother Elvis). Flipping between 4:3 and full widescreen. Low rumblings on the soundtrack that make it sound like a Transformers movie is bleeding through from the cinema next door. (I checked, it wasn't.) Longlegs isn't primarily a thriller or a horror movie, it's an Osgood Perkins film. And of course there's nothing wrong with that, but not only isn't Longlegs the scariest film of the decade, it's not even the scariest Osgood Perkins film (which I think is probably the splendidly titled I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, though it is a fairly long time since I saw it).

Maybe I just wanted an exciting, entertaining popcorn potboiler and I got a weird, unsettling Name Director movie instead. It's certainly interesting and it's undeniably creepy and offputting, and there's no question that it conjures up an indefinable mood of dread. But it's not by any measure the scariest film of the decade and it's not by any measure a masterpiece. And having now seen it twice, in cinemas, I really don't get why anyone is saying that it is.

**

TWISTERS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Let's twist again, like we did twenty-eight summers ago... Another example of a studio rummaging down the back of the Intellectual Property sofa and discovering something that must surely have some nostalgia mileage still left in it. Twister was a hit a generation ago and mysteriously never generated any followups at the time; perhaps a wise move to leave it as a one-off because it didn't really leave room for any kind of development other than mere repetition. And it's hard to see what's changed because Lee Isaac Chung's film has literally only one thing in common with Jan De Bont's, and that's the presence of the Dorothy device that dispenses the sensors into the tornadoes. (It doesn't even share the title font, except on the artwork!). None of the original's characters are even mentioned, none of the main crew have returned, not a bar of Mark Mancina's score is quoted. Which raises the question of why bother to give Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin a credit in the first place.

Yet the similarities are endless: a traumatic opening reel tragedy for the heroine, lines of SUVs and pickups driving through cornfields and running each other off the road, small towns reduced to shattered debris, a support team of techies and loveable eccentrics, a Jo Grant character who's basically there to say "But Doctor, I don't understand" so everyone else can funnel the exposition to us (Jami Gertz in the original, an out-of-his-depth British journo in this one), a cinema ripped to pieces by the storm even as the film keeps playing, endless awful soft rock on the soundtrack. Daisy Edgar-Jones is even wearing the same costume Helen Hunt wore.

Missing, however, is any sense of character or chemistry: any sense of why the science gang are doing what they do. We do get why the rival group of stormchasers are in it: they're a bunch of thrillseeking YouTubers and swaggering dumbasses, more concerned with getting amazing drone footage and selling merchandise; they're led by a charmless and immediately obnoxious egotist (Glen Powell) and I spent the first hour plus hoping he'd get hit in the face with a combine harvester: he's no Bill Paxton There's a slight wrinkle in the motivations, in that the apparent good guys and loudly yeehawing idiots aren't quite as initially presented (can a film called Twisters have a twist?), but there's no depth to any of them so it's impossible to care.

I actually rewatched the original Twister on Blu the night before - hardly a chore as I've always liked it - and to be honest there isn't a level on which Twisters triumphs. Sure, there's not a huge complexity to the original's characters but at least they're likeable. The effects work, which was cutting-edge back in 1996, still stands up incredibly well; today's effects are undeniably terrific but so they damn well should be for the insane amount of money they spent on it. Benjamin Wallfisch's score is perfectly alright (when you can hear it) but nowhere near Mark Mancina's instantly memorable themes from the original. It looks wonderful, certainly: another example of how film stock will always be superior to digital.

So what was the object of the exercise? Without any of the original cast (two of whom have since passed away) or crew, this is more remake than sequel and it's nowhere near as good. On its own terms it's a spectacle, but that's all it is: a lot of loud noise, widespread destruction, and a plot that's basically a succession of increasingly large storms. That's true of the original, of course, but Twister was so immensely likeable and entertaining that it absolutely worked on the wild rollercoaster level. Twisters adds characterisation that's barely even thumbnail, a romance that doesn't remotely convince, and needless nostalgia for a film that's managed perfectly well as a one-off for nearly thirty years. I can't figure out why, but the original will always have a place on my Blu shelf and I'm pretty confident that I'll probably never watch Twisters again.

**

SOMETHING IN THE WATER

CONTAINS SPOILERS GLUB GLUB GLUB

There may well be Something In The Water but there's nothing on the screen. Director Hayley Easton Street (who, let me state right from the start, is no relation) has apparently described this film as "Jaws meets Bridesmaids", and it sounds like one of those improv party games where you're given two random movie titles and you have to come up with an immediate pitch that combines them. And I suppose it's accurate, given that it has a shark and some bridesmaids in it. But that really isn't enough.

It begins with a vicious homophobic assault in London that's unnecessarily brutal, in that it feels like it's from a different, nastier film entirely. A year later, the two estranged lovers who were targeted that night meet again in the Caribbean for the wedding of one of their lifelong friends: their hen night festivities include a boat trip to a deserted island paradise. But on the way back the boat leaks and sinks, there's no phone signal, one of the gang can't swim and there's something in the water...  

Cue the usual shouting, screaming, recriminations, truths and reconciliations, while a mostly unseen menace munches them one by one. If you've seen Open Water, The Reef, The Shallows, Adrift, And Many Many More, you'll know very quickly where this is going, who is going to survive and what's going to be left of them, offering no surprises along the way. Granted, we're not down in the Mariana Trench of films like Shark Attack 3, but it's still just another shark movie and it's hardly worth the effort. (Side note: I haven't actually seen Bridesmaids, but if it's basically Something In The Water but without the shark, that hasn't sold it to me.)

*

THE EXORCISM

CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE BLEEDIN' OBVIOUS

Priests? Check. Creepy music? Check. Moving furniture? Check. References and connections to a certain early 1970s horror classic? Check. Swearing and grisly makeup effects? Check. People wandering around in the dark for no good reason? Massive check. The Exorcism really is one of the blandest and least shocking horrors in ages. Originally (and far more memorably) called The Georgetown Project five years ago, it's now been saddled with the dullest title imaginable and its content is so thunderingly unshocking that it's got away with a weedy 15 certificate.

It does have a fairly decent idea, with Russell Crowe as a washed-up actor with one last shot at getting his career together post-rehab and quashing his own inner demons: playing an exorcist in a remake of a certain early 1970s horror classic. Like that certain early 1970s horror classic, it appears to be cursed: Crowe's character (Anthony Miller, presumably named after Jason Miller, star of a certain early 1970s horror classic, who also happens to be the father of this film's director) is a last-minute replacement for another actor who suddenly and mysteriously died in the opening scene; a studio light suddenly falls from the gantries, just missing someone as it lands. Meanwhile Miller can't remember his lines or get into character and behaves increasingly erratically...

This is the second Russell Crowe exorcism movie in the last couple of years (even though this one was apparently mostly filmed first) and it's easily the weaker of them. It does very little of any interest and a whole lot of stuff we've seen many times before, and trots it out to no real effect. And it's yet another brand new horror film that seems to think that switching the lights off is scary. Darkness is one thing, but  shooting extended scenes in almost total darkness, to the extent that any image still discernible is all but lost in the ambient light from the cinema's exit signs, is something else entirely and a regrettable trend in current genre offerings. (Night Swim, Baghead and Tarot are particular offenders this year.) The Exorcism really should be a lot better than this: it certainly had the potential, but it's just so crushingly ordinary, a massive box of very, very ordinary. And while it's a tossup as to whether it's as bad as last year's dismal Believer, it's unarguable that even the lesser actual sequels of that certain early 1970s horror classic - even the second instalment that almost everybody hates - were better.

*