A Satanic serial killer (Nicolas Cage) murders families in a ritualistic birthday-based sequence in this thriller they should have called The Birthday Basher.

Osgood (son of Anthony) Perkins’ extended riff on Silence of the Lambs is a jumbled mess of lazy clichés, preposterous conveniences and inane dialogue (“Maybe Longlegs will kill again!”). A deeply uncharismatic Maika Monroe plays a half-psychic FBI agent (“Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all!”), which means she sometimes knows things when the script can’t be bothered to find an explanation.

Psychic powers, Satanic forces and scary dolls become the movie’s go-to for papering over plot holes, using magic to explain away every nonsensical element. And there is a lot of nonsense to explain away. The protagonist is a qualified FBI agent seemingly afraid of her own shadow, while her feckless superiors dismiss the news that Longlegs is about to kill again: “What do you expect us to do about that?”

Most egregious though is Cage as the titular killer, whom the film expects us to believe has gone 20 years undetected while walking around looking like something out of The Real Housewives of Salem, complete with insane botox, white face paint and a Julian Assange wig. And while the film elegantly reminds us this is not a crime (“He worships the Devil, that’s for sure, but in the United States of America he’s allowed to do that.”), his behaviour (which includes constantly screaming about murder and openly leering at children) is so extreme that a clown with a chainsaw in one hand and his penis in the other would attract less suspicion.

His performance means that a movie already unsure if it’s a police procedural, psychological thriller, Southern Gothic or supernatural horror, simply becomes a Nicolas Cage movie. What makes Cage a horrible actor is not necessarily anything technical, but his need to make every film about him. To cast him is to make a deal with the Devil; your film may gain notoriety, but it will be forever smeared with shit.