Son del Diablo

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

They're up to the devil's business.

LONGLEGS (2024)

Writer/director Osgood Perkins is best known for making slow, atmospheric horror movies where not a whole lot happens. I can’t say I was a fan of his movies The Blackcoat’s Daughter or I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and I never got around to watching his take on Gretel & Hansel. He tried branching out into horror comedy with The Monkey, but that didn’t work for me, either. Of the five movies he has made to date, the only one I can really say I liked was Longlegs, which sort of plays like a Satan-fuelled twist on The Silence of the Lambs.

Maika Monroe stars (and does a great job) as awkward, soft-spoken FBI agent Lee Harker – and when she demonstrates that she may be at least “half psychic,” her superior William Carter (Blair Underwood) decides to assign her to investigate a cold case. The Longlegs serial murders. For decades, these murders have been happening where a father wipes out his family before committing suicide, and coded letters from a Satanic madman called Longlegs are found at the scene. How can someone be compelling fathers to wipe out their families? It’s up to Harker to figure that out... and she hasn’t been on the case for very long before her instincts, her possible clairvoyance, and maybe even a mysterious connection to the situation has this cold case flowing like lava. 

Perkins throws in some bizarre, unsettling twists and turns along the way, like a scene involving a survivor (played by Kiernan Shipka) who is now totally devoted to Longlegs and would be “happy as peaches” to do terrible things for him, moments with Harker’s religious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), and the discovery a strange doll with a high-energy metal orb inside of it. The movie has a very weird vibe throughout and some great, disturbing imagery. And while the story is about Harker’s search for the perpetrator, Perkins doesn’t keep his identity a secret from the viewer. We know from the start that it’s a guy being played by Nicolas Cage.

Going into Longlegs with knowledge of Perkins’ previous slow and uneventful movies in mind,  I assumed that he would gone for a more low-key, restrained performance from Cage. But that’s not the case at all. Instead, Perkins let Cage go all-out, singing and screaming lines, delivering his performance through a thick layer of prosthetics and makeup. Longlegs is one odd looking dude, and Cage is chewing the scenery while playing to the back seats – and the movie is all the better for it. Unleashed Cage is always a wonderful thing.

Some may still find Longlegs a bit slow and it’s not the most eventful movie, but I found it to be very interesting, sometimes troubling, and, especially when Cage was on the screen, quite entertaining. 

TAROT (2024)

Back in 1992, author John Peel, writing under the pseudonym Nicholas Adams, brought the world a paperback horror novel called Horrorscope, which was apparently a murder mystery about a killer who selects victims based on the signs of the zodiac. I haven’t read it, but I have seen the movie adaptation from the writing and directing duo of Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg – which is said to be completely different from the source material, so I’m not sure why it’s considered to be an adaptation of an obscure book from thirty years ago. But hopefully this at least means that John Peel got some movie money from the deal.

The film stars with college friends Haley (Harriet Slater), Grant (Adain Bradley), Paxton (Jacob Batalon), Paige (Avantika), Madeline (Humberly González), Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz), and birthday girl Elise (Larsen Thompson) celebrating Elise’s birthday at a rented mansion in the wilderness of the Catskills. When they run out of beer, they go searching the property for booze – and in the process, they find a wooden box with a zodiac wheel on the front and a deck of tarot cards inside. Haley happens to be into tarot, so her friends ask her to do a horoscope reading for them. As the title the novel Cohen and Halberg largely ignored gives away, this turns out to be a “horrorscope” reading!

That’s because this set-up is sort of reminiscent of Final Destination, although this movie isn’t nearly as good as any of the Final Destination flicks. In those movies, someone has a premonition that are bunch of people are going to die, so those deaths are averted, then Death itself has to come through and makes sure the people who were supposed to die do end up meeting their end as intended. Not in the same method, but they’ll be dead nonetheless. In this movie, Haley gives some creepy horoscope readings with warnings that someone might “slip up and suffer a crushing blow” or be lead “down the wrong track” – then, once everyone has turned home, the characters start dying off in ways their horoscope readings warned about. So, for example, one slips through their attic entryway and suffers a crushing blow from the ladder, another is led down the wrong subway track and gets hit by a train.

What’s somewhat cool here is that the monstrous characters featured on the tarot cards – the High Priestess, the Hermit, the Hanged Man, the Fool, the Magician, Death, and the Devil – appear to the characters and work to help them meet the demises they’ve been warned about. The movie is quite dark, so it can be difficult to see these things, but it’s a neat idea nonetheless.

Of course, it comes down to the recently broken-up couple of Haley and Grant to get to the bottom of what’s going on and figure out how to save themselves and their remaining friends. We get a serviceable story about a vengeful astrologer cursing the tarot cards in the 1700s, leading to several deaths over the years, and an appearance from Olwen Fouéré as Alma, a tarot reader who had a run-in with these cursed cards years earlier. It’s basically the same role the actress played in the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, and she has about as much luck in this movie.

Tarot isn’t great and the characters are lacking, but if you’re in the mood for a horror movie there are much worse ways to spend 92 minutes. It’s worth checking out, then you’ll probably forget most of it soon after.

DAUGHTERS OF SATAN (1972)

Directed by Hollingsworth Morse from a screenplay by John C. Higgins (with John A. Bushelman earning story credit), Daughters of Satan gets started in the perfect grindhouse / drive-in exploitation movie way, with a topless woman strung up and being tortured by a group of smiling Satan worshippers. Within seconds, you have movie-goers thinking the movie is going to turn out to be worth the price of admission. If only the rest of the film sustained that level of artistry.

The film stars Tom Selleck as James Robertson, an American man who drives around the Philippines in his little red convertible, looking for items he can purchase for the United Museums Fund. He is lured into an antique shop by the owner, Carlos Ching (Vic Diaz – who seems to have been in every exploitation flick made in the Philippines)... and while the place doesn’t have anything that’s museum-worthy, there is a painting from the 1600s that depicts a trio of women being burned at the stake. James is fascinated by this painting and is compelled to buy it because one of the women looks exactly like his wife, Chris (played by Barra Grant, who has called herself Miss America’s Ugly Daughter, as she’s the daughter of Miss America 1945 Bess Myerson). The audience knows that this is a set-up; Carlos knew all along the painting featured the likeness of Chris, and getting James to buy it was a trap.

As soon as the painting is in the Robertson household, things get weird. Holding up a mirror while looking at the painting, Chris confirms that one of the witches looks just like her – and breaks down into tears. She finds that she knows more information about the event shown in the painting than she should. She starts hearing a voice calling her name. Then, women who look like the other witches in the painting enter her life (one of the women was doing the torturing in that opening scene), as does a disappearing or teleporting Rottweiler called Nicodemus, who was also shown in the painting. As these characters show up in reality, they start to fade out of the painting. James starts seeing things and having run-ins with violent attackers, and Chris starts doing things that are out of character – like gas-bombing her husband while he sleeps.

James tries figure out what’s going on, and as part of that quest, he has to have an amusingly awkward interaction with that Satan-loving torturer, Tani Phelps Guthrie as Kitty Duarte. Don’t expect too much heroism after him, though... and don’t expect the movie to come to much of a thrilling conclusion. It kind of just sputters out after a while.

Back in 1972, United Artists released the Philippines-shot horror movies Superbeast and Daughters of Satan as a grindhouse / drive-in double feature... and I really pity the poor folks who saw that double bill listed on marquees and decided to check it out in hopes of seeing two good horror movies, because they were in for a disappointing viewing experience. At least Daughters of Satan has more interesting stuff going on than Superbeast did.