Longlegs (2024) review

During the Bill Clinton years, there's a serial killer who signs his encrypted letters "Longlegs" (Nicolas Cage in heavy makeup) that can supposedly take out whole families without ever setting foot in their home or leaving fingerprints, so "partially psychic" FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned the daunting task of investigating the case ... but it turns out she and her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) have a connection to the lunatic.  If that description sounds even semi-coherent I can assure you I did a more thorough job thinking about this dimwitted "horror" film than its own writer-director, because aside from Cage's brief but (typically) unhinged performance, the movie is almost completely incoherent (as if pieced together from disparate notes with little to do with each other) and is missing anything remotely unsettling (unless dolls spook you out):  Perkins' "technique" of letting his camera sit idle in moodily lit rooms doesn't create any sense of dread and those random inserts of bubbling blood and snakes don't either.  The "viral" marketing campaign for it was smarter than the completed product - billboards were created with a phone number posted on them so that anyone who dialed it heard creepy message - and perhaps those individuals should have been handed the cameras and editing equipment instead.