Courtesy of A24
The third chapter of West’s trashy, homemade horror franchise reconfigures the sleazy thrillers of the ’80s, but perhaps not enough.
“X,” the first film in Ti West’s trashy, homemade horror franchise (it was billed as a trilogy but could still produce more installments), was an unusually effective attempt to recreate the farm-turned-mass grave of the the atmosphere of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”, spiced with the meaty voyeurism of 70s porn. For a retro slasher film, it was a novelty and a curiosity. The crazed killer was an old farm wife suffering from erotic frustration – played, under a ton of makeup, by Mia Goth, the same actress who played one of the porn actresses in the film. The film was much better than your average “Chain Saw” imitation, but it never really transcended the slasher formula. It was a psycho thriller crafted with the encyclopedic rigor of a fanboy filmmaker.
But “Pearl,” a prequel that West shot right after “X” (it came out six months later in 2022), took a surprising leap. It told the story of this former farm girl — who, in “Pearl,” was now an apple-cheeked girl living on her family’s Texas estate in 1918, obsessed with becoming a star in the racy new world the cinema.
Goth played her once again, but this time the character was dynamic and driven, living on aspirations – and the film took us inside all of that to the point that when she starts killing people , you feel the rare sensation of empathy for a demented slasher. . Goth had a seven-minute confessional monologue in “Pearl” that sounded like something delivered by Liv Ullmann. And yet, brandishing a pitchfork as a murder weapon, she was also terrifying. The film was about madness, the dawn of feminism, “Carrie” and “The Wizard of Oz,” the bloody horror of denied dreams. And Mia Goth has proven that she is a wonderful actress. “Pearl” was a quantum leap from “X,” and it made you think: If this is part two, what does Ti West have up his sleeve for the third installment?
This movie, which comes out on July 3, is called “Maxxxine”, it is set in 1985 and is named after the character played by Goth in “X”, who is now a famous adult film actress, Maxine Minx, in the sector half-corporated. -the video world of Los Angeles skin films. Maxine, like Pearl, aspires to become a star. Early on, she auditioned for a role in a horror film called “The Puritan II,” which was like “The Crucible” remade as a Z-level blood fest. But for her, it would be more than a step up. Before. It would be a step towards legitimacy and perhaps fame. Porn stars, at the time, had little or no chance of breaking into mainstream films, an idea that was at least flirted with when Brian De Palma considered casting triple X superstar Annette Haven in “Body Double » (the studio said: plus our dead stock portfolio). But in “Maxxxine,” the main character’s desire to cross the border gives him an outsider’s fervor.
The way the film presents it, it’s Maxine’s thirst for fame, her unwavering desire to break out of the depths of the sex industry, that sets her apart. That and his inner fire. And inner fire, as we know from “Pearl,” is something Mia Goth can really bring. She plays Maxine with enough direct and convincing aggression to leave us wondering if Maxine might be hardcore porn’s hidden answer to Vivien Leigh.
When a filmmaker recreates an old genre, to the point where it is obvious that he has immersed himself in it, it is generally a sign that he is aiming high, that he is trying to make “cinema”. This is certainly the case for Ti West. In his A24, low-budget way, he’s as obsessed with old movies as Quentin Tarantino; he riffs on them like a fetishistic cult homage act. But just as Tarantino can draw inspiration from the baser filth of grindhouse, West, in “Maxxxine,” applies his genre film scholasticism to a form that seems, at first glance, to be the definition of unsavory : the 80s sexploitation thriller. – the kind of poorly lit product, featuring women in heavy metal lingerie and psychopathic stalkers who are like leering stand-ins for the men in the audience, that no one ever claimed to be Good. De Palma took inspiration from some of these films as well, but “Maxxxine” is less contemporary with De Palma than a knowing nod to the films you used to see stacked in the VHS bargain bins of convenience stores.
The trick is this. West wants to pay homage to their utter smut – and, at the same time, create a version of one of them that is ironically “good.” He wants to do for the scuzzbucket of ’80s sex and horror what Tarantino did for Hollywood’s pulp drive-in. “Maxxxine” is a macabre exploitation thriller placed in quotation marks, with an anachronistic and powerful heroine at its center.
At the beginning, Maxine is working behind the plastic window of the Show World department store, where she gives private three-minute performances for customers, when the killer enters, dressed in shiny black leather from his hat to his gloves. He was looking for Maxine – and his reaction, as he rips the wooden frame off the inside of the booth, is a reference to both “Hardcore” and “Manhunter.”
Is he the Night Stalker? He’s the serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles for a year in the mid-’80s, and
“Maxxxine” includes this real monster in its fictional universe. It sounds scary, but it’s the kind of slasher pastiche that uses random killers for added suspense. At first, Maxine is walking home when she gets stuck against a chain-link fence in an alley near another psychopath with a knife. They are everywhere ! The fact that he’s dressed like Buster Keaton is funny, and Maxine, pulling out a gun, makes him strip and teaches him a feminist lesson he won’t soon forget. This all makes the scene fun. Yet the garish coincidence of it all, the atmosphere of Jack-in-the-box violence, is extremely garish.
West, tinged in the 1980s, nods to the off-screen culture of Christian (and Congressional) protest against sinful pop culture: “Satanic” heavy metal, porn, demonic horror films . The film presents it all with lip-smacking nostalgia, presenting the war between Christianity and entertainment demonism as the true horror film. And Maxine is one of them. She is indeed cast in “The Puritan II,” and the film’s director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), who is at this point the very rare female filmmaker in the industry, turns out to be a fierce artistic intellectual who teaches Maxine how to survive in Hollywood. Sure, “The Puritan II” is a piece of bullshit, but its creator says she’s trying to make “a B movie with A ideas.” This is a key line, because it expresses Ti West’s agenda.
Its main ideas include deconstructing the way Hollywood degrades women, even though they are the center of everything it sells. This means tracing the invisible continuity between mainstream Hollywood, Z-movies, and the sex industry (the cinematic patriarchy), all cemented by the references the starlets continue to make to a “party in the hills,” that party mythical where an aspirant can meet. the producer or director who will change her life, or perhaps the sugar daddy who will take care of her, or both at the same time.
There’s a key scene set on the set of the “Psycho” house (which, as the “Psycho” sequels demonstrate, is completely debunked when shot in color and used as a B-movie prop). Kevin Bacon appears as a private detective who actually works for the killer, and Bacon, with several gold teeth, chewing on a large trailing New Orleans okra, is having so much fun playing a character who resembles the Jake Gittes scripted by Abel Ferrara that you go there, assuming (or hoping) that he will delve deeper into the plot. And Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan, as feuding partners on the homicide squad, demonstrate just how much Ti West’s casting influence has grown since “Pearl.” There’s some rough VHS evidence: a copy of the porn film called “The Farmer’s Daughters,” which Maxine was filming in “X.” That film has disappeared, but it could now lead to a murder conviction.
The crazy power of “Pearl” was in its off-center ambiguity: the way it made Pearl a scary killer. “Maxxxine,” as entertaining as the film can be when it revels in ’80s nostalgia at midnight, has a moral structure that is both more traditional and more grating – a noble heroine in peril (even if she killed a times in self-defense), an evil patient lingering in the shadows. When we finally get the reveal of who the killer is, it’s supposed to be Babylon’s heart of darkness. But instead you just think, “Sorry, I don’t believe that at all.” Especially considering the price of homes in Hollywood Hills. Ti West is a good filmmaker, but maybe it’s time for him to stop reconfiguring garbage. He must try to fit A ideas into an A movie.