From the nasty fun corner of our big screen entertainment menu comes Longlegs, the feel-spooked hit of the summer. Here, writer-director Osgood Perkins has cooked up a horror film which both nods to the tropes and beloved elements of form in the B-movie genre while injecting it with intelligent twists, a keen visual and place-conscious eye, and variations on the form.

Oh, did we mention a truly new and newly unnerving demonic villain in the man called “Longlegs?” This conniving, Manson-esque serial killer (or killer by proxy), with a mop-haired, pasty-faced madman countenance and confessed obedience to “Mr. Downstairs,” is creepily embodied by Nicholas Cage. Cage, also the film’s producer, doesn’t have to dig very deep in his thespian and psychological playbook to conjure up the required frightful eccentricity for the job.

An added attraction in the film is the unexpectedly nuanced and magnetic performance by Maika Monroe, born and raised in Santa Barbara and an actress who first made her splash in another horror flick, It Follows, a decade ago. In Longlegs, she is less a classic imperiled damsel-ish “scream queen” than a complicated character with a past, decoding an ugly crime pattern involving slain families, girls with common birthdays and demonic dolls. She plays an FBI agent on the Longlegs case, with a “half-psychic” awareness and connections to a harrowing past only slowly revealed through the film. Monroe is excellent as the presumed voice of reason amidst the anarchic narrative and in the face of Cage’s manic manipulations. But reason starts to get real personal as the film careens into its surprise final act.

As one last touch of a winking easter egg in the film (they know that we know some devil-ish fun is at work here), the end credits break with tradition by scrolling downward — aka hellward. Meanwhile, Marc Bolan sings “Bang a Gong,” circling back to a quote from the song in the film’s intro: “you’re a dirty sweet/you’re my girl.”

Longlegs is a thinking person’s horror outing, validating the notion that such presumably “lowly” genres as action and horror can also be containers for cleverly crafted and engaging cinema art. It may scare the bejeezus out of some viewers or impress those of us seeking out sneak attack art-making on the summer movie circuit. Or both. 

See trailer here.

It’s usually at the end of the review that I talk about a film’s MPAA rating, but I’ll twist it up for “Twisters.” Or rather, for its 1996 predecessor “Twister” and its all-time terribly-worded rating justification. The film was rated PG-13 for “intense depiction of very bad weather.” Yes, the depiction was intense, and yes, the weather was very, very bad, but those twisters were so violent and destructive that “weather” seems like the wrong word to describe them. They may as well have used the term “extreme windiness.” The twisters are similarly violent and destructive in “Twisters,” which is much more sensibly rated PG-13 for “intense action and peril, some language and injury images.”

The new film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate and Glen Powell as Tyler, two storm chasers with different reasons for traveling Oklahoma looking for tornadoes. She’s trying to set up a 3-D mapping system that will help scientists understand how tornadoes form and thus save lives. She used to think she could rig up a chemical reaction that could actually stop a fully-formed tornado, but a field test in the film’s opening moments turns deadly, so she has to settle for the mapping system endorsed by her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos). Tyler wants to shoot fireworks into a tornado to make a cool visual that gets him subscribers on Youtube and increase his celebrity so he can sell tacky merchandise. Kate is glad to have the moral high ground, or so she thinks.

As the film progresses, Tyler shows he has more layers than Kate initially thought. He’s a learned meteorologist and a big-hearted humanitarian. It also turns out that Kate may have jumped on the wrong bandwagon. She and Javi are noble, but their team’s sponsor isn’t. Kate and Tyler find that they like chasing the storms together, helping recovery efforts together, and just plain spending time together. Cute squabbling turns to cute flirting. Please tell me it’s not much of a spoiler to find out that there’s romantic chemistry between the smoldering cowboy and the beautiful scientist.

Then there are the twister sequences themselves. I used to be terrified of tornadoes, but the fear mostly dropped off when I hit my teens. This movie may rekindle some of that fear, especially after the opening sequence. The rest of the sequences are fine. I was never unconvinced that there was danger afoot. One thing I knew going in was that twisters, while they can form quickly, don’t lend themselves to jump scares, so I was wondering what the film would have to do to push my buttons that way. There are two effective jump scares that made me scream for half a second and then laugh for several full ones.

You can probably guess the kind of experience that “Twisters” provides. It’s a PG-13 disaster movie. The action scenes, while fraught with mortal danger, aren’t going to feature anyone getting ripped limb from limb. The comedic and romantic scenes are perfectly predictable as well, with Edger-Jones and Powell having the pleasing chemistry I knew they’d have. Of the characters that survive among Kate, Tyler, Javi, and Tyler’s colorful team, I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters in more movies. I’m sure the filmmakers can come up with more creative storm scenarios. For now, this was exactly the movie I expected it to be, but I had a reasonably good time watching very bad weather.

Grade: B-

“Twisters” is rated PG-13 for intense action and peril, some language and injury images. Its running time is 117 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

In “Inside the Episode,” writers and directors reflect on the making of their Emmy-winning episodes.

Clear eyes. Full hearts …

It took a lot of tears, both on- and offscreen, but “Friday Night Lights,” the drama about small-town high school football that was about way more than just small-town high school football, finally won two Primetime Emmys in its final season. At the 2011 ceremony, one award went to lead actor Kyle Chandler as the coach and (sometimes de facto) patriarch Eric Taylor. The other went to “FNL’s” behind-the-scenes father figure, showrunner Jason Katims, who wrote the drama’s series finale, “Always.”

“FNL” was beloved because it had the magical ability to be set around the lives of high schoolers and their parents — Coach Taylor was nothing without his wife, Tami (played by 2011 Emmy nominee Connie Britton) — but to not necessarily feel like a teen soap.

“It’s funny, when I first started talking to reporters and critics about it, they would ask, ‘How does this compare to other teen shows?’” said Katims, who wrote for “My So-Called Life” and created “Roswell.” “Until somebody mentioned it as a possible teen genre kind of show, I literally never even thought of it that way. … I thought of it as a story of this town, a story of these people.”

He speculates that perhaps this was because “even though those people are teens, they’re dealing with such adult things and themes.”

To wit: The series finale isn’t just about the football team making it to the state tournament, it’s about love, marriage and partnership. Just as Eric and Tami argue against their teen daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden) getting engaged to her on-again, off-again boyfriend Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), they have their own marital strife as they decide whether Eric should sign a new contract for a coaching job that would keep them in town or if Tami should have her moment and follow her career out of state.

Meanwhile, Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) has grand plans to stay in his home of Dillon, Texas, forever while his ex-girlfriend Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) explores new opportunities in college. Aspiring football coach Jess Merriweather (Jurnee Smollett) relocates to Dallas while her boyfriend, all-star player Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan), starts his own journey. And, with his football career derailed after an injury, Luke Cafferty (Matt Lauria) joins the military. He and newly reunited girlfriend Becky Sproles (Madison Burge) share a tearful goodbye at the bus stop as he gives her his championship ring.

Over a decade later, The Times held it together long enough to speak with Katims about the events of “Always.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The show aired on NBC before finishing its run on Audience Network. Given those changes and how this would affect cast availability, how far out did you start planning the series finale?

We didn’t really know in the fourth season exactly what we were going to do. We had it vaguely in our mind. But for the fifth season of the show, we really were planning it right from the beginning in the writers’ room.

Were there serious scheduling issues [with actors who’d already left the show]? I’m sure there were. But I think everybody who had been part of the show felt very committed and very, very, very much part of it and wanted to be there for the end.

There were the actors who really wanted to be part of it. Scott Porter [who played injured football star Jason Street earlier in the series’ run] showed up for the last scene, even though he wasn’t written into it. It was the scene where they were on Riggins’ land and he really wanted to be in that scene [because those characters were such good friends]. [That scene was cut from the finale.]

The show had some key phrases that you also worked into the finale. We see Coach Taylor, who relocates with his family to Philadelphia for Tami’s job, trying to teach a new group of football players the inspirational message “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” And we see Tim Riggins and his brother Billy (Derek Phillips) clinking longnecks and saying, “Texas forever.” Was there a conversation about who would get to utter those phrases?

It was really clear to me that Coach was going to be in the “clear eyes” and Riggins was going to be “Texas forever.”

Those weren’t conversations that happened in the writers’ room. Those happened when you were writing the script. But the big ideas, like the ball going up in the air at state and then landing in Philadelphia was not my idea. It was an idea that came out of the writers’ room.

Whether this team does win the state tournament is kind of like not seeing a body in a horror movie. It’s never explicitly shown or said.

It’s a funny thing about that because you do know who won the game because there were so many things in that final montage that were references to [them winning]. A lot of people had rings. They take down the championship sign from the [high school]. It was clear that they had won and the reason we didn’t see the win itself was because I felt that that football game should be poetic. There weren’t any more moves to make at that point in the show, in terms of the drama of the football game. To me, it was more the emotional journey that we’d all gotten to.

I’m really happy with the way the game transitioned into the final montage of the season. The whole episode is about closure. You don’t usually write that way. Usually there’s tension and then some catharsis, and these days, then another catharsis and then a cliffhanger. But there were five seasons leading up to that episode, and it was all about resolution. There were people declaring their love and all that stuff.

The tensions running through it were the questions of what’s going to happen to Coach and Tami. That was a serious dilemma. I felt like that made for the most dramatic tension in the episode.

Obviously, there were other things as well. There’s that scene with Tyra and [her ex-boyfriend] Tim where they’re talking about the future. It feels so beautiful to me to watch these two people who were so in love and put on divergent paths.

Why did you decide to call the episode “Always”?

The show is about love. It is a love story. It was about Coach and Tami and Matt and Julie and Vince and Jess and Luke and Becky.

But it was also the permanence of that culture of high school football. And there’s something touching to me, and moving to me, in that final montage. You see all these people playing in different stadiums, but they’re still playing the same game, but it doesn’t, weirdly, matter that much.

So much of this show, and its characters’, identity is wrapped up in Southern culture and lifestyle. So I always thought it was interesting that the Taylors moved out of the South.

What we were trying to do for the whole season was make this a really difficult choice for Coach. Coach and Tami, people would talk about that as such a great marriage. We knew, at a certain point, that we were never going to tell a story about one cheating on the other or divorce. Those stories were off the table. There was something sacred about that, about them. That’s wonderful to watch. But as a writer, it’s challenging because we need conflict.

In their particular marriage, it had always been that they were going where Coach would go [for work]. To me, the key to the whole episode and the whole season was him coming to her and saying, “It’s your turn.”

It’s very feminist and progressive of Coach to think this way.

You know, Coach is a very traditional guy. You see it when Matt says [to him that] he wants to marry his daughter. You see it at the dinner scene when they’re all together [and Coach and Tami tell them they’re too young to get married]. He doesn’t address his daughter. He addresses Matt.

There’s a lot of traditional thinking around Coach Taylor, which is why that decision he makes [with Tami] is so dramatic. It shows a man really changing.

This seems like something Tyra went through a lot. That’s a character who felt like she had to get out, otherwise nothing would change for her.

For Tyra, that’s a big thing. In the last episode, when she has that scene with Tim, she’s talking about wanting her life to be big and going into politics. … She was inspired by a woman like Tami, but she could see that her future should be bigger.

One of the things that’s so powerful about the show is that Dillon, Texas, is this beautiful town and you feel all these things about community and faith and lifting each other up and love and all that. But it’s also a place where you can get stuck and feel like you have limitations on you.

It was also really touching to see that last scene with Matt and Julie [when they move to Chicago and are engaged]. My thought about that is that they’ve become Coach and Tami. She looked a little more like Tami. But she was doing it in their world. It was a different, more urban world.