The Pitch: With his trilogy of cheeky, genre-bending slashers, writer/director Ti West (alongside actor/producer Mia Goth) has been testing the limits of his love of pastiche. X was a sleazy ode to Tobe Hooper slashers mixed with the lurid thrills of ’70s hardcore pornography; Pearl delighted in its camp origin story filtered through Old Hollywood sheen and Hitchcock suspense. While those were filmed back-to-back, MaXXXine, the final chapter, was filmed on its own; in the interim, it seems like West and Goth have lost what made those movies either good or at least interesting (depending on who you ask) and get lost in the homage.
Years after surviving the events of X, porn-star-turned-final-girl Maxine Minx (Goth) has finally made it to “Tinseltown, California” (as the location card cheekily tells us) in the coke-fueled 1980s. In the opening scene, she leverages her considerable acting skills to nail a monologue for the lead in a sequel to a well-regarded slasher flick. Naturally, she gets the part, and is ready to finally show the world that she’s capable of doing more than skin flicks.
But a couple of interweaving dangers complicate her first big step toward success: First, the “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, whose grisly murders are the subject of every nightly news anchor’s breathless report. And more personally for Maxxine, there’s the threat of blackmail from a mysterious party (represented by a slimy Southern-fried PI played by Kevin Bacon) who knows what went down back in X and is more than happy to tell the world.
No Business Like Giallo Business: From its opening montage, MaXXXine is doing A Lot — blasting ’80s New Wave hits, slick montages of VHS-fuzzed news reports, the drug-and-star-fuelled excess of Hollywood at its peak. There are a lot of ideas swimming around here, both as sequel to X and West’s own take on the cultural and media milieu of the ’80s. West touches on everything from Sunset Boulevard to video nasties to porn to giallo slashers. But those disparate elements struggle to fit into a cohesive whole, making this a particularly clumsy close to the trilogy.
It’s frustrating because, in fits and spurts, MaXXXine is quite fun — a kind of blood-soaked take on Mulholland Drive or even The Player, with plenty of cheeky nods to the facades (both literal and metaphorical) inherent to the movie business. Maxine’s new director, a severe and controversy-courting auteur played by Elizabeth Debicki, takes her under her wing and professes her desire to making “real art” with her slasher pictures. It’s a nifty mirror of Maxine’s desire to leave her own low-class origins and become Important in some way. But the making of the film itself is secondary to West’s desire to also recall X in all its blood-soaked luridness, and he has a tough time tying it all together.
There are simply too many threads attempting to be woven together: West remembers that the “if it bleeds, it leads” cycle of American news violence coincided with the Moral Majority of the religious right in the ’80s, but his attempts to merge the pair feel hokey and contrived. Even the film’s grasps at perversity feel tacked on; the film runs away from Maxine’s porn past almost as quickly as she does, leaving little eroticism left in her comparatively chaste life as an “honest” actress.
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MaXXXine (A24)
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