MaXXXine is a Sleazy Throwback to the Sordid Excess of the Reagan Era
Finally, a movie that treats the honor student by day/streetwalker by night classic Angel with the reverence it deserves!
On social media, Paul Schrader recently paid Ti West an exquisitely passive-aggressive compliment. He wrote that West was such a talented filmmaker that it was a shame that he was wasting his prodigious gifts making slasher movies.
When a commenter asked if Schrader was saying that slasher movies were inherently garbage, he responded in the affirmative. Facebook’s weird grandpa was putting his foot down and asserting that all slasher movies are trash.
Intoxicated by their proximity to fame and angered by Schrader’s sentiments, a commenter told Schrader to get bent.
I thought that was disrespectful. The man wrote Taxi Driver for the love of God. Taxi Driver. Yet I also understood the enraged commenter’s anger. I love slasher movies and consider them art as well as entertainment.
Then I went and saw MaXXXine, the film that led Schrader to publicly rail against slasher movies as a subgenre, and I could understand Schrader’s thoughts as well.
When you make a movie as aggressively trashy as MaXXXine, some people will think it’s garbage no matter how artfully it is constructed.
If I were Ti West, I would feel oddly flattered that the man who wrote Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder found my output excessively dark and disturbing.
Pearl, the second film in the X trilogy, but one that takes place decades before the others, was overtly modeled after The Wizard of Oz, and Disney MaXXXine is based on lurid, exploitative b-movies that critics hated when they deigned to write about them at all.
MaXXXine feels like it should play as the second half of a double bill in a rundown Times Square theater where the men all wear trenchcoats for easy access, and the floors are sticky with spilled soda and less savory but equally sticky substances.
West’s movie seemingly takes inspiration from Angel, Vice Squad, the Maniac Cop trilogy, and Cannon’s entire 1980s output. Its vulgarity is overwhelming and intentional, its violence over the top in a stomach-churning fashion that had me flinching and looking away from the screen regularly.
The splashy vehicle for the fiercely charismatic Mia Goth, who also produced, takes place following the events of X and Pearl.
Goth’s badass anti-hero just barely survived the film shoot from hell chronicled in X. She had to slaughter a mass murderer in order to avoid being gutted herself alongside her friends and coworkers. That’s good preparation for making it in Hollywood.
MaXXXine belongs to a fascinating subgenre of movies about filmmaking that I chronicle extensively in The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on the subject, about how making it in show business is LITERALLY murder.
Maxine comes to Hollywood with that killer instinct. Our haunting and haunted heroine comes to Los Angeles with a body count and an agenda. She’s killed before and seems pretty jazzed about doing so again. Maxine’s agenda, meanwhile, is to make the tricky but not impossible crossover from pornography to straight acting.
Goth has that mysterious X factor known as star power. Here, as in the previous two entries in the series, she a volcanic presence that erupts regularly. She is in complete control of her feral sexuality and clear-minded about her path in life.
Maxine is also fucking nuts. Early in the film, a creep in a Buster Keaton get-up approaches her in a dark alley with a switchblade. Maxine quickly goes from prey to predator and victim to victimizer when she repays the criminal’s malevolent interest in her by stomping his bathing suit area so hard that his penis and testicles leave the rest of his body and plop down on the street in a bloody heap.
West is throwing down the gauntlet. He’s establishing early on that this will be the kind of movie where a dude has his junk smashed so hard in semi-righteous retribution that his balls leave his body and plop down on the concrete. MaXXXine is not for the squeamish. By having this sequence happen so early in the film, West is telling us exactly what we signed up for, and if we don’t like it, we can leave.
MaXXXine very aggressively takes place in a New Wave 1985 against the backdrop of The Night Stalker’s reign of terror. Maxine has a serial killer closer to home to worry about. She secures a potentially career-making film in a horror sequel but watches with mounting mortification as the people closest to her are brutally murdered and branded with Satanic symbols.
Kevin Bacon devours copious scenery while showcasing the world’s thickest, least convincing Southern drawl as a degenerate gumshoe hired by a mystery client to keep a close eye on the starlet and induce her to visit his spooky abode high in the Hollywood Hills. Bacon seems overjoyed to finally be in a movie sleazier than Wild Things.
Maxine senses danger in this ominous invitation and avoids it like sobriety, but the mystery creep isn’t about to be discouraged.
MaXXXine isn’t necessarily supposed to be good. It is, after all, an exceedingly, perversely faithful and reverent tribute to sleazy b movies that are objectively the fucking worst. That’s why they’re so great.
The same is true of the performances. West cheekily acknowledges this by making Bobby Cannavale’s cop character a failed actor who has channeled his frustrated professional and creative ambitions into being the most dramatic detective on the force.
Canavale is a great actor who does a terrific job playing a character whose defining characteristic is that he is never as convincing as he desperately wants to be.
West lays the 1980s period detail on thick. This is the kind of loving throwback that lets you know in no uncertain terms that the Coca-Cola being consumed alongside even more unhealthy forms of Coke is the ill-fated and short-lived New Coke, not the beloved, time-tested concoction we all know and love.
Mia Goth’s stormy magnetism and West’s uncanny gift for recreating the look, sound, and feel of earlier eras of horror tie the trilogy together, along with Goth’s star-making turns as Maxine and Pearl.
MaXXXine is tonally different from Pearl to the point of being antithetical. Where Pearl is dream-like and highly stylized, MaXXXine is a punch in the gut that goes too far and then just keeps going.
West’s retro romp is the weakest of the trilogy, but it still packs a potent punch. In a jaded horror realm, it retains the power to shock and provoke.
In MaXXXine, Goth’s iconic title character is a killer heroine in more ways than one.
Three and a half Stars out of five
This film had a lot to live up to (I loved Pearl more than X) and it delivered. Goth, who has been great in the worst films (Infinity Pool, The Cure for Wellness), gets the star vehicle she deserves.
As if Tarantino had made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as one of his grindcore movies, is roughly the zone we're in here. I don't love slasher films, I love referential film-fan slasher films even less, but hey, I just never saw a good one until now, and MaXXXine is the best.
I'm trying to jump on board this train, but I am having some difficulties. I saw "X" a year or two ago, but only got around to seeing "Pearl" about two weeks ago. I thought the first was okay, and while "Pearl" was more interesting from a style point of view, its story seemed very slight to me. To the point where the film ended and I thought "is that it?" I get the aesthetics of this trilogy are part of it's popularity, as was "House of the Devil," but I haven't quite gotten the overall appeal of the storyline itself. Not yet at least. I will see this one too; I was a teen of the 80s, so this may be the one that hits my nostalgia sweet spot the most.