Director Ti West’s MaXXXine has one thing for each sort of horror fan: for the movie snob who can dissect homages right down to a digicam angle, the horror classicist lacking ‘80s gore, the informal who likes their scares reasonable and the enjoyable in full provide. It’
s the July Fourth weekend AC escape you’re on the lookout for.
That West’s X trilogy even exists is a feat value celebrating. MaXXXine is the third movie in a sequence that the beloved indie horror filmmaker kind of inadvertently backed into. It began with X, his 2022 70s-slasher homage, that includes not one however two dynamic performances from Mia Goth as each Maxine, a headstrong Ultimate Lady (and aspiring porn star), and Pearl, the murderous octogenarian who torments and kills her erotic film movie crew after they make the deadly mistake of filming on her farm. The reception was rapturous sufficient to encourage West to go full ‘98 DMX and ship Pearl—a Technicolor-tinged prequel flashing again to Pearl’s homicidal origins on that very same farm in WW1-era Texas—that very same yr.
Now he’s closing out the saga with MaXXXine, which picks again up with our titular heroine within the ‘80s, amid the hysteria of Los Angeles’ Evening Stalker murders. Proper as Maxine finds herself on the cusp of changing porn stardom to a real, reliable Hollywood profession, a copycat killer begins offing her buddies and threatening to destroy every little thing she’s achieved.
In a trilogy that wears its homages on its sleeve, MaXXXine is probably the most enjoyable of the bunch, absolutely revelling in 80s sleaze and seediness. Come for the A24 horror status of all of it, keep for West stretching that repute to the silliest limits the studio will enable. Kevin Bacon co-stars as a cliché lecherous P.I., Bobby Cannavale as a cop who says one-liners like he’s auditioning for Miami Vice, Giancarlo Esposito as a Hollywood agent who actually says he’s buried just a few our bodies, Elizabeth Debicki as an asshole director passing off horror shlock as excessive artwork. Everyone seems to be giving West their greatest wink, supplemented by stylistic nods to auteurs like Hitchcock and De Palma.
This sequence could be nothing with out Goth, and that is her most alluring and unsettling efficiency but. West movies Los Angeles like a petri dish of vice and dirt and Maxine is the antibody bending the system to her will. She’s a drive of nature, a wrecking ball of manifest future. Emboldened by surviving the occasions of X, she arrives on this movie as no person’s damsel or sufferer—and even overcomes West’s personal themes. Collectively, all three movies dissect the corrosive components that an obsession with stardom can breed; Maxine is aware of she’s being offered a dream and counters with, “so what?”
MaXXXine doesn’t reinvent the wheel a lot as improve the tires, however I might’ve watched one other half-hour of Goth turning the tables on intercourse pests, pummeling stalkers, and striding down each the scummy streets of Hollywood and the sunshine-soaked soundstages of Burbank because the grasp of all she surveys. Give Mia a Wes Craven-inspired fourquel set within the 90s, give her a Maxine miniseries…give her something she desires!
