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.
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.
The production design grasps at the kind of video-store grime of films like Hardcore and Taxi Driver, but it feels like imitation more than evocation. You can only slather so much red paint and red light on a set before it feels like you’re trying a bit too hard to provoke. And the ’80s-ness of it all feels as authentic as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a cartoon of neon lights and shoulder pads and Coke (both powdered and New) that practically begs elder millennials to point at the screen like Leo.
I Will Not Accept a Life I Do Not Deserve: It all hangs on Goth’s slender shoulders, and to her credit she maintains the kind of wild-eyed unpredictability she carried through both her prior pictures with West. Maxine’s a firecracker, a vulgar starlet so confident in her own ability that she bulldozes her way into the business through sheer chutzpah. She even leverages that unfiltered confidence into her own brushes with danger — she’s not just a Final Girl, she’s practically more dangerous than the people chasing her.
But the events from X still haunt her; one of the film’s few successful grasps at tension come when she’s forced to sit for a life cast fitting, cranium encased in gloopy plaster that evokes, if nothing else, Goth’s drooping skin and melting features as Pearl in the first X. As we see, that becomes the worst possible time and place for a panic attack.
There’s something to Maxine’s single-minded ambition that even overcomes her fear of being held up or murdered; she’d just as soon snatch her attacker’s gun away from them and make them fellate it (before, naturally, stepping on their balls so hard they pop, one of the film’s many fun gore effects).
But the scenes around these bursts of ultraviolence don’t cohere. Maxine kind of floats through the movie, snapping at people who threaten her and cozying up to those who admire her, making decisions on pure impulse left and right. What’s more, the script leaves her surprisingly passive for someone so dedicated to taking what she wants. Even the moments where she decides to step up to the plate sideline her to let other, less important characters (like Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan’s underwritten cops) take center stage.
The Verdict: MaXXXine can’t decide whether to be a showbiz parody or a giallo sendup or a cute ’80s throwback, and it stumbles when it tries to be all of the above. This is a shame, really, since West and Goth had something interesting on their hands with the twinned X and Pearl, the tale of two women chasing fleeting dreams of stardom from the fringes. Actually letting the small-town girl make it to the big top somehow makes it feel less interesting, no matter how many suitcases full of severed limbs tumble down staircases.
Where to Watch: MaXXXine leaps from Tinseltown to theaters July 5th.
Trailer: