She has lived What the newspapers dubbed “The Texas Porn Star Massacre,” a long, dark, Type O-splattered night that left her fellow purveyors of quality adult entertainment chalked up to the fact that Maxine Miller, better known by her stage name Maxine Minx, must endure an environment so horrific, so deadly, that her chances of survival are probably less than zero: the world of Hollywood blockbusters. MaXXXine is an homage to ’80s horror films, a loving recreation (and reclamation) of period horror films, the end of a seminal 21st-century horror trilogy, and another testament to the cinematic duo of director Ti West and star Mia Goth. But it’s also a stab at how the Dream Factory has always been a nightmare for so many of those who fight their way to the top, and a reminder that the carnage it creates for consumers is nothing compared to the real-life criminal atrocities that take place outside the studio’s gates. Los Angeles is devouring itself, its alleyways littered with spitting bones.
Sorry, this looks like a thesis project getting a chin stroke. You’re still watching a movie that takes perverse pleasure in watching a potential rapist get his testicles trampled in an affectionate and macabre close-up. The third collaboration between the good folks who brought you the 70s grindhouse ode X and the singularly disturbing and brilliant pearl (both 2022), MaXXXine The film revels in 1950s sordidness with the intense devotion of a Civil War reenactment. It may be the weakest of the three films, but that fact says less about the quality of this particular fetishization than about the high bar West & Goth have set with their previous installments. Having transposed their fixations on the return of the repressed to the Reagan era, the director and star continue to connect the dots between sex and violence, porn and horror, public sex and private predatory behavior. There is no bloody industry like show business.
As for the wonderful Miss Minx, she has “recovered” (note the quotes) from that long-ago Lone Star nightmare and has established herself as a next-generation Seka in the world of triple X. Now, she’s ready to conquer the world of mainstream cinema. Luckily for her, a potential crossover is on the horizon, in the form of a starring role in The Puritan II, A sequel to a great slasher. When Maxine goes to read the script for the producers, she turns an exploitation-movie monologue into a kind of Shakespearean soliloquy. Excellent work, she’s told. Now, please, take off your top. The casual way our heroine loses her top, but not her composure, suggests she’s well aware of how the game is being played. The porn world is just more transparent about it.
Director Elizabeth Bender (The crown(Elizabeth Debicki), sees something in Maxine’s ambition—not to mention her real-life story—that intrigues her. She gets the part. But around the same time, a mysterious videotape shows up on Maxine’s doorstep. It features news reports from that horrific Texas massacre. But there are also old home movies of Maxine doing a soft-shoe number as a girl, while her pastor father eulogizes his daughter offscreen and has her recite the American Success Story mantra: “I will not accept a life I don’t deserve.” Maybe this unsolicited flashback to her past has something to do with the shady detective lurking around; he’s played by Kevin Bacon in full creepazoid mode, which coincidentally makes this the second movie this week to blend his ease with creepy villains with ’80s passions. Or maybe it’s the fact that someone’s wearing a YELLOW-style black gloves hunts down Maxine. Meanwhile, many of her friends and former on-screen partners have started turning up dead…
Behind this campaign of targeted killings are a number of potential suspects, from the private eye to the director herself to Minx’s agent (Giancarlo Esposito). Even the two cops (Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan) investigating the string of homicides aren’t above suspicion. West is understandably less interested in who committed the crime than in how it was committed, staging gruesome, old-school murders with a professional’s eye and a lifetime of experience. Fangoria the subscriber’s vertigo.
He’s also much more determined to give his muse another meticulously staged stage on which to run wild, and as with X And Pearl, Goth proves once again that there is no better actor in genre films right now. What she brings to this retro-splatterfest cannot be understated; the star has a way of suggesting that steel is both a defense mechanism and a hard-earned privilege for Maxine, while giving you a glimpse of the PTSD beneath the Teflon smile and Aquanetted hairdo. While there is nothing on the level of pearlWhether it’s the climactic monologue or the end-credits close-up, Goth always turns this parable of the final girl’s revenge into superior flashback pulp. West is more than willing to simply be the Von Sternberg to his Dietrich horror film. If he can spill gallons of blood on stage, make references to Satanic Panic and pay homage to Double body via a needle from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, it’s just caramel syrup frosting on the cake.
That MaXXXine That the film ends with hellfire and brimstone under some iconic Hell-Ay sign is not only surprising but inevitable—this is a film that thrives on metaphysical digs at the traditional epicenter of the film industry, throwing in signifiers like Theda Bara’s star on the Walk of Fame and the Bates Motel set for good measure. Every street in Hollywood has its own story and horror story, and while it’s not exactly an original sentiment, West & Goth know how to make that warhorse lament howl and sing. We meet Minx as a person and leave her as a star, cleansed of her sins by horror-movie salvation. It’s certainly love-letter material, but the fact that it’s written in dark red ink is no accident.