MAXXXINE (2024)

 

With X (2022) and then Pearl (2022), writer-director Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers) rather unexpectedly initiated a decades-spanning portrait of evil that allowed him to access distinct movie styles— using the richness of ‘30s Technicolor in Pearl to map the psychological terrain of a character who serves as a rotting vision of what might have happened to Dorothy Gale had she never been swept off the farm to catch a glimpse of Oz, or the sun-bleached, grungy foreboding of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as the template for X.

The trilogy comes to a close with MaXXXine, in which the porn star would-be actress Maxine, who  survived a massacre in X perpetuated by the demented murderess Pearl, who somehow retained a degree of sympathetic connection with the audience, if not her victims, has found her way to Hollywood circa 1985 in relentless pursuit of the life she believes she deserves as a mainstream movie star. She lands the lead in a sequel to a ‘80s video nasty that may provide the path to that stardom right about the same time that another murderer, disguising his unfortunate victims as those belonging to real-life Los Angeles serial killer Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, begins bringing Maxine’s bloody past back to haunt and perhaps eventually extinguish her.

Since we’re in the middle of the Summer Olympics and in thrall to the far more ambitious and impressive achievements of gymnast Simone Biles, it’s impossible for me to resist saying that MaXXXine fails to stick the landing fans of the previous two films were hoping for. And part of the problem may just be that, being newly beholden to the aesthetics of an era in which neon-lit, relatively style-free, formula-bound splatter films were the order of the day, West ends up recreating not only the look of the sleazier, tourist-unfriendly Hollywood Boulevard of the time, but also the limitations of that particular form of visual and narrative storytelling.

MaXXXine is fun moment to moment, but as it moves toward its sleazy milieu toward the answer to the mystery of just who it is stalking Maxine, the movie starts to get bogged down in attempts to comment on 2024 by evoking images of Moral Majority-esque protests and heavy-handed proclamations about low art usually delivered via the movie’s own directorial stand-in (Elizabeth Debicki), about whom West never really takes a stand as to her status as either self-proclaimed artist-with-a-voice or just another pretentious industry hack. (Debicki’s haughty film director may be modeled at least partially on female horror auteurs like Stephanie Rothman or Amy Holden Jones, whose Slumber Party Massacre was written by Rita Mae Brown.)  And it eventually succumbs to the sort of thinly fleshed-out third act that was part and parcel of the video and theatrical nasties of the day— there’s nothing here to match the chilling, searing endings of either of the previous films. If sleazy ‘80s horror is your thing, there may be plenty here to provide a gristly meal, but merely revisiting that cheapo VHS aesthetic was not enough for me.

And speaking of the previous two, MaXXXine is also hobbled by the fact that it’s the only movie in the series that does not work fully as a stand-alone film. Without particular knowledge of what transpired in X, West’s somehow elliptical, I would say almost cavalier approach to grounding his audience in events that have transpired which directly affect his new film and the character of Maxine Minx is kind of perplexing, and audiences without that foreknowledge might find themselves confused to the point of indifference.

However, MaXXXine does still have Mia Goth, who absolutely makes you believe she is a woman, however mangled by her past and her own violent tendencies, who will not accept anything less than the life she feels she deserves, and if there’s less of the psychological depth she brought to Pearl (and that film’s absolutely soul-shaking final moments), she’s still fully committed to the role and she’s never less than riveting. So much so that the movie never really lives up either to its predecessors or to Goth herself.

MaXXXine is fun in its way, especially if you can see it the way I did, at a drive-in in the middle of a darkened, forested patch, but compared to X and especially Pearl it’s an anticlimactic finish to an otherwise strong series.

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