It is in this crucible that Maxine’s success might finally come when she is hired by the ambitious genre director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) to star in The Puritan II, a folk horror flick that’s a step enough away from the video nasties of its era to be filmed on the Universal Pictures backlot.  As Maxine’s big break arrives, however, so too does a seeming blackmailer whose face she never sees. Even so, his lackey—a private dick played by Kevin Bacon with a delightfully terrible Cajun accent—is always fast on her heels. Meanwhile friends and colleagues in the adult film scene appear to be dying at an alarming rate and in increasingly heinous style. The press think it’s the work of the Night Stalker, but Maxine knows all too well that some things you leave buried in the swamp have a way of floating back up.

From its setup alone, MaXXXine is obviously a much more elaborate film than either X or Pearl. Both of those pictures were shot on the same “Texan” (read: New Zealand) farm. They were true indie experiments that attempted to channel the aesthetics of cinema eras past on a budget and in a remote location. Their runaway success and popularity opened MaXXXine up to be grandiose, and more than one person I’ve talked to compared it to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. The 43-year-old West exudes copious amounts of nostalgia, too, while recreating the look of ‘80s Hollywood. Which is to say it’s notably far more of a cesspit than a film set in 1969.

So the comparison is partially apt, but the nostalgia just isn’t for an era of Los Angeles lore gone by. Instead West is chasing a style of genre filmmaking that’s gone out of vogue. While horror has definitely had a renaissance in the last decade—with West himself lightly chiding me when I used the word “elevated” while discussing X with him several years ago—the horror of today is generally reaching for a more psychological and humane grounding. In other words, it makes for an easier bedfellow when excavating the visceral dread of ‘70s indie cult classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as well as the Val Lewton-infused lushness of Pearl.

MaXXXine, by comparison, is a chance to embrace some of the seedy absurdity of the genre’s trashiest and most decadent era. That includes sequences of Maxine being stalked by a killer in a fog machine-filled back alley, and murder sequences that are more reminiscent of Sean S. Cunningham junk than Tobe Hooper or John Carpenter. But it’s part and parcel for a love of a time and place that extends even beyond simply horror.

In one sequence, in particular, Bacon resembles Jack Nicholson in Chinatown as he pursues Maxine on the Universal backlot; and the Hollywood homicide detectives played by a fun if underused pairing of Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale might as well be out of any ‘80s cop movie—complete with MaXXXine’s third act detour into action movie spectacle.

All of these varied qualities and an overstuffed cast of impressive talents, including Giancarlo Esposito as the kindest agent in Tinseltown, will undoubtedly turn off some viewers who appreciated the simplicity and clarity of purpose in X and Pearl. Despite its gargantuan scope, MaXXXine is probably the thematically thinnest of the three films. It’s as enamored with the joke of casting Bacon—an actor who like Maxine got his start in ‘80s Hollywood’s horror basement—as it is with Maxine’s own personal demons. And yet, we’d argue MaXXXine is probably the frothiest and most breezily entertaining of the three because it revels in its indulgences, right down to a third act that skips by the obvious grim ‘70s Hollywood ending in favor of a little Bruckheimer and Simpson fairy dust.