MaXXXine

The third and hollowest installment in Ti West's X trilogy is this gleefully derivative exercise in meaningless style over well-trod substance. The first film in this unintended series, X, was an evocative period slasher with an intelligently sleazy premise and some well-crafted scenes, especially dialogue scenes, but it was hardly the type of movie that called out for multiple sequels. Yet, thanks to the COVID-19 shutdowns, West and star Mia Goth had a lot of downtime in which they wrote an elaborate backstory for one of the characters Goth plays in that film. What they wrote begat Pearl, an entirely different type of period slasher that was more original and captivating than its predecessor. It does not seem like West spent as much time dashing off this more direct sequel to the first film. In MaXXXine, Goth's other character from X, Maxine Mink, the sole survivor of the '70s bloodbath at a Texas farmhouse she and a group of folks were shooting a porno, has escaped to Hollywood and this the 1980s. When we catch up with Maxine, she is about to cross over from adult films to legit horror movies until her past catches up with her.

What's so disappointing about this picture is that the titular character Goth plays here has none of the depth of her protagonist in Pearl nor the intriguing counterpoint of her duel role in X. Here, she's just an indestructible badass who will stop at nothing to achieve her generic goal of becoming famous. It may be fun and even empowering to watch this determined survivor fight back against the forces that get in her way and the dreaded "Night Stalker" serial killer who haunted LA in the mid-80s. But all this vicarious vengeance reaches its crescendo early in the picture when Maxine confronts a knife-wielding creep in an alleyway. The result of this interaction is certainly satisfying, but it doesn't leave much in the way of room for the film to top this moment. West's entire ethos up to this point has been the slow burn. His movies draw you in with their leisurely passed establishment of the who, where, and why before unleashing the carnage. But in MaXXXine, we already know the who and the why, and the where comes through like a brick through a plateglass window via needle drops, movie references, newscasts, iconic locations, and every other trick in the LA period-piece tool bag. I had been hoping West would try out a new structural approach, but now that I've seen this film, I guess I want him to go back to his tried and true slow burn.

Of course, after establishing characters and ideas that are dropped in favor of something shinier, Maxine does build to a climax that's meant to deliver the type of thrills and chills typical of West's oeuvre, but where this story ends up... oof, it's really dumb. The movie concludes so badly that it negates anything that might have been remotely interesting in its first 80 minutes. But nothing we got there was all too compelling anyway. Set the year after Brian De Palma's wonderfully junky erotic horror thriller Body Double, MaXXXine tries to be something more than a homage but winds up as something less. Most of De Palma's '70s and '80s output were homages already, usually borrowing premises and plotlines from Hitchcock on which to hang boundary-pushing stylistic choices. Here, West is borrowing no-longer-boundary-pushing stylistic choices from De Palma on which to hang... a tertiary exploration of how our culture has reacted to pornography and slasher films? Do we really need another shallow cinematic self-examination into this subject? One of the myriad movie references this Hollywood-set picture includes is a shout-out to Psycho II, but the '80s Anthony Perkins picture MaXXXine reminded me of was Ken Russell's dimwitted, edgeless X-rated snoozefest Crimes of Passion.

Goth gives one of her usual compelling, though I still can't fully see what the big deal is, performances but, unlike the fine ensemble of X, is surrounded by a cast that either barely registers (Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Moses Sumney) or seems like they're trying to one-up Goth's larger than life choices (Giancarlo Esposito, Simon Prast, and especially Kevin Bacon—who, in the key supporting role of a private investigator out to give Maxine a hard time, seems like he's trying to play Benoit Blanc by way of Bobby Peru in a performance that wears real thin real fast). It's depressing how many recent films about the pursuit of fame spend most of their time recreating the Hollywood of a bygone era with exacting detail and pretty much leave it at that. From Quinton Tarantino's overrated Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood to Damien Chazelle's unforgivable Babylon—with elegantly empty imitative crap like Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho covering much the same ground—these movies clearly want to celebrate cinema, but they mostly succeed in driving home the message that cinema may be long dead.