MaXXXine
Review by Ryan Painter
[You can read Mark’s review of the film HERE, and listen to the two of them discuss the film further using this link:
]
Horror
Director: Ti West
Writer: Ti West
Starring: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Kevin Bacon, Michelle Monaghan
Rated: R for strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and drug use.
Synopsis: In 1980s Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.
Review: Once upon a time horror savant Ti West made a little film called X that took audiences into the heart of 1979 Texas (it was actually 2021 New Zealand) with a group of young adults intent on using a remote farm as the setting for their get-rich-or-die-trying porno film. They pretty much get the latter without any of the former.
Quarantined in New Zealand, Ti West and Mia Goth shot a brilliant, bonkers prequel. Set in 1918, Pearl is a satirical, bitterly nostalgic, and (somehow)l traditional small-town girl dreams of stardom story featuring a rather traumatic scene with a scarecrow. The Wizard of Oz this ain’t.
Flash forward to now for West and Goth’s madcap finale MaXXXine. Set in Los Angeles in 1985, the film is a homage to films of that era set against the backdrop of satanic panic and the real Night Stalker murders. Maxine, our final girl from X, has made a name for herself in the adult film world. She wants more. No one is going to keep her from the life that she deserves.
Maxine lands a leading role in a horror sequel. It’s a make-or-break moment for the aspiring starlet. But Maxine can’t help but be somewhat distracted by the murders of her friends and the pushy detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) who have identified her as a person of interest. She’s being stalked by a seedy detective (thank you Kevin Bacon) who claims to work for an enigmatic man who knows all about her past and the events that took place on the farm 6 years. (A joke referencing I Know What You Did Last Summer at this point might seem appropriate, but that’s a ‘90s unsuitable for MaXXXine).
X was built around the cinematic style and tropes of horror films in the 1970s. Pearl was built around the warm glow of films made in the 1950s with an incredibly dark modern sense of humor that shouldn’t have worked. But it did work. MaXXXine, trapped in the tropes of 1985, will undoubtedly be criticized for being as dim witted as some of the horror films of that era. What had been original and shocking in the 1970s had been commercialized. The budgets were still miniscule, but elements of comedy helped to cover up the shoddy prosthetics and nonsensical storylines to persuade mobs of teens and young adults to sit through the unapologetic gore. No one was particularly interested in creating anything realistic. They just wanted to slop around in as many buckets of blood as they could afford.
It was all a bit silly, really.
MaXXXine is somewhat disappointing in that the era it is paying homage to doesn’t really allow for Goth to give another unforgettable performance. Maybe West shouldn’t have stayed as true to the era. You could argue that he could have taken the sensibilities of ‘80s horror and combine it with some of the post-Witch elevated-horror ideas that made their way into Pearl.
Nonetheless, he chose to be true to the films that clearly made him a horror fan. and he absolutely nails the ‘80s aesthetic. Even the soundtrack was perfect. Rather than simply playing a best of the ‘80s, West included the songs that would have been popular at the time. For instance, rather than Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” we get “War” and rather than New Order’s “Blue Monday” we get “Shellshocked” (unfortunately the thematically perfect “Touched by the Hand of God” wasn’t released until 1987).
Unfortunately, staying true to the popular slashers of the era gives MaXXXine a glass ceiling that neither X nor Pearl had. Even if MaXXXine were perfect (and I’d argue that it comes incredibly close) it was never going to score more than a 7 or 8 out of 10. Yes, that makes MaXXXine the weakest link of the trilogy. That said, it is easily the most fun. I love the rollercoaster thrills that many ‘80s horror films provide and MaXXXine is one hell of a ride.
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