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I am discussing these films together largely because I double billed them at the cinema yesterday evening. While this grouping might have initially been lead by circumstance rather than design though, there are as it turns out at least a couple of reasons to look at these two movies next to each other.

First off there is the Psycho connection. When looking up Longlegs director Oz Perkins I was interested to find that he’d played Dorky David in Legally Blonde but I stopped there. What I hadn’t discover, and this is far more interesting for the man whose new film is being hailed as a contemporary horror classic, is that he is also the son of Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins.

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MaxXine also has an explicit link with Hitchcock’s classic in that a couple of key scenes are shot at the famous Bates house and motel on the Universal Studios lot. This movie, set in 1985, also references that Psycho II had also been recently shot there. (The second Psycho film came out in 1983, twenty three years after the original, kind of making it the very first legacy sequel.) What’s more Oz Perkins was actually in that very movie as well, as the young Norman.

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Outside of this Longlegs and MaxXine also sit as interesting companion pieces in that the former is working to rewrite horror movie conventions, while the latter is totally built around them.

Right from the start Longlegs feels very different to much of what we have seen in the past. It is being spoken about as a new Silence of the Lambs but that’s not really what it is. Straight away the framing and atmosphere shows innovation and Perkins sets himself out as a new voice in genre cinema, moving past his acting career (which also includes parts in Star Trek, Secretary, Wolf and Nope) and stepping out from the shadow of his famous father.

The plot revolves around a young female FBI agent tracking down a serial killer, hence the media mentions of the Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins Oscar winner. There is a strong supernatural element as well though which is initially laid loosely over proceedings before becoming more explicit at the end. This certainly adds to the film but in some respects it takes something away as well. There is a question throughout as to how the man suspected of behind the series of domestic massacres being investigated is doing it without apparently even being present at the time of the crimes. Ultimately the answer is effectively that it’s magic, albeit demonic magic, which is not the most satisfying resolution to a police drama. Imagine if the killer had turned out to be a ghost at the end of Zodiac, or indeed if Norman Bates and his mother were genuinely the same person morphing between two personalities in the same body like some kind of werematriarch. That would have been silly, right?

To be fair that is not a totally fair criticism of something that is set up as a horror film from the start. More unforgivable is that Longlegs is not at all frightening. It has certainly been sold as such. One of the posters has taken a quote from Flickering Myth (a site that appears to just be someone’s blog – I mean what credentials does that have?) that says this is ‘the scariest film of the decade’. It really isn’t. It is certainly very, very creepy but that is not the same thing. Some of the unsettling nature of the film comes from the inclusion of some spooky dolls, which while this is not a new idea is handled in a fresh way, but mostly it’s Nicholas Cage.

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Cage is brilliant here and so much of the movie hangs on his performance but he is very heavily made up with prosthetics and in a world where movie make up has recently done some amazing things, as in The Whale, The Batman, Bombshell and Darkest Hour, this just looks like Nicholas Cage very heavily made up with prosthetics. I guess it lends itself to cheaply authentic Halloween masks, which I’m sure will now become a thing. Still though, it’s a been a while since any movie has made such good use of this actor’s weird character proclivities, if ever. Credit has to go to Alicia Witt and Maika Monroe who are also very good in this. Monroe incidentally is no relation to the Hollywood legend that she shares a name with.

What Longlegs does have is a huge amount of atmosphere. Some might say the way it builds this is a little slow but ultimately it works in its favour. I’m not sure I actually enjoyed Longlegs, and I’m certainly not raving about it as much as some have. I admire it but watching it is not totally satisfying and not a lot of fun.

MaxXxine on the other hand is a lesson on how to present a violent, dark and gory horror film and still make it a great ride. Far from being groundbreaking this movie wears its influences on its sleeve, held on with sticky blood and pinned deep with a knife. The inclusion of the setting for Psycho, and the themes it shares, is only one example of how this riffs on previous films. The third film in a trilogy that has previously referenced everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hardcore, Alligator, Boogie Nights and The Wizard of Oz, this really leans into a wide cinematic legacy by actually being set in the film industry.

The story follows Maxine Minx who was the sole survivor of the farmhouse massacre in the first movie as she makes the transition from porn star to serious actor (the second film Pearl was a prequel about the original’s killer). There is a parallel with director Ti West here who with these three movies has worked his way right into the mainstream. 2022’s X which started this off was a seedy sex slasher with few recognisable actors in it (it does feature Jenna Ortega but this was before Scream or Wednesday). Pearl similarly had no famous cast to sell itself on. Both were successful though and now the final part has a cast that includes Elizabeth Debicki, Giancarlo Esposito, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Monaghan, Lily Collins and Kevin Bacon. Also notably Goth does not have to get her boobs out anymore which a sign that she is now in a mainstream movie.

Like his protagonist, West has not compromised his sensibilities though and even though this is a big release movie it is still a bloody, sexy parade of violence and excess (there are other women’s boobs in it). Some have said the end goes too far but I wonder if they’ve been watching the rest of the film. (Although the final reveal of the antagonist is so obvious that I wonder why they ever hid it.) What this movie knows that perhaps Longlegs lost sight of, is that all of this stuff is silly and as an audience MaxXxine brings you in with it’s characters rather than pushes you away.

Cold and brutal as Goth’s Maxine is though (as illustrated by a wince inducing turning the tables scene early on), you do see how the trauma of the events of X have affected her. The Halloween movies also show the damaging effect of being a final girl but Laurie was not really a killer herself. The Scream movies try to do the same but not as effectively and there are still too many films where innocent people are forced to turn to violence to survive a vicious killer and yet sitting in the door of an ambulance with a sheet around them for ten minutes appears to be all they need to get over it. It is good to see a movie that deals with this better.

All in all I enjoyed my double bill. It’s certainly been a while since I’ve done one other than those programmed as such. I saw A Quiet Place 1 and 2 back to back and did Fast & Furious 6 and 7 at one point but back in the day we’d often catch two films in one cinema trip. This was certainly a better pairing than the one I did of Dracula and Reservoir Dogs in 1992.

There is another thing that strongly links Longlegs and MaxXxine as well in terms of who the protagonists finally have to face off against and how this happens but I can’t say any more about that.

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The Ripley Factor:

Both of these movies put young women in incredible and threatening situations against male aggressors, and minor spoiler alert, they both rise to it.

While MaxXxine does have some female nudity it doesn’t feel as exploitative as it did in X and you could argue it is in service to the plot. In terms of wider representations of women in strong positions both have senior female law enforcement officers and MaxXxine has Debicki as a big movie director which wasn’t hugely common in the mid 80s.

The violence meted out is slightly more toward women than men in both films but any slight skewing of the gender balance here is again narratively justified.