She's a star, but everyone else is a chump
dir: Ti West
2024
Maxxxine is the kind of flick you get when you promised a movie trilogy and ran out of ideas by the end of the second film. What to do in the third one…
I genuinely thought the first two movies rocked. I thought X was hilarious and ever so brutally violent, and passionate about its shlockiness. Pearl was a completely different film, and a fairly bonkers one at that. This one though…
I had watched many 80s slasher flicks, back in the day, well, mostly in the 90s, to be honest. I have seen, now, many parody flicks, homage flicks, satirical takes on 80s slasher flicks as well. Too many. I have now seen one more, one which perfectly apes the look and the feel of those days, which is as deliberately dated as anything you can remember from Stranger Things.
Remember Stranger Things? Seems like we all moved on a little quick from it. Anyway, so, Maxxxine. If nothing else this trilogy serves as a reminder of what a charismatic performer Mia Goth is, but the sad thing at least is that her performance isn’t as memorable as her earlier two (three, really), in the first two flicks. Hell, the character she played in Infinity Pool was far more memorable and terrifying than whatever this flick serves up here.
Maxine in this flick’s era, which is 1985, is famous in the porno world, but not as famous as she would like. She’s getting on in years (early thirties), and knows that her career options are going to diminish. She seeks roles in the ‘legitimate’ movie world, despite no-one thinking that she can get passed her past.
That’s not even the past she’s trying to move on from. The past she’s really trying to get away from is the events from the first flick, being X, where many murders transpired, however many were justifiable. There’s also a deeply creepy scene in the intro where a very young Maxine is pledging on camera both something something Jesus, but also that she’s going to be a bright fucking star one day.
Against all odds Maxine nails an audition and gets cast in a sequel to what would have been called a video nasty back in the day, by a British director, called The Puritan, but II.
Seeing this as her big break, Maxine gets slightly distracted by the fact that she’s doing cocaine all the time, and that she lives in a very shitty gross city called LA, and that all the people around her are dropping like flies. Not only are they being murdered, but they’re being branded and tortured so that it looks like Satan worship or heavy metal video clips. Video… yes, there’s a lot of video in this flick.
There’s a video shop that a character works at (musician Moses Sumney, who is there only to be murdered, like most people in these movies). A video is sent to Maxine in order to scare her. She watches videos for entertainment. She eats video tapes for breakfast - sorry, that was a joke. People who look like Mia Goth / Maxine don’t eat breakfast; they power through their hunger with more cocaine and cigarettes, the admitted breakfast of champions.
The city is under siege already because of the Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, who is murdering people for unironic reasons and hasn’t been caught yet, in between all the other murders we’re meant to be concerned with. People are protesting at the studios and on streets, randomly, saying that nudey films are bad, music is evil, Satan is everywhere, and Hollywood is possessed by devils.
And then Buster Keaton tries to attack our dear heroine in some alleyway. His terrible mistake is that he doesn’t realise that Maxine is already a Final Girl, the one who survives at any cost, and he finds out in the most gruesome manner that he should never have fucked with her in the first place.
Unlike the main character she played in the second flick, Maxine here is in no way delusional. She knows exactly how unlikely it will be for her to get where she wants, even with her drive to succeed. No-one else has transitioned from porno flicks to mainstream as yet, but she’s determined to make it happen in ways commensurate with being in a creepy 80s murder flick.
If you were going to pigeonhole the flick obviously you’d say it’s a horror flick, but it plays out more as a deranged and oddly referential thriller that, like the other flicks, almost entirely references other flicks.
The idea couldn’t be more literal than when the film director (Elizabeth Debicki, again enunciating entirely like she’s the headmistress at a school for etiquette and deportment where the ladies are beaten when they misquote a line of poetry) escorts Maxine on the Universal Studios lot to the set for the Bates Motel and the spooky house behind it. In the window of the mansion Maxine spies not the ‘mother’ of Norman Bates glaring out at her, but Pearl (Mia Goth), the old woman who she cruelly and ruthlessly butchered at the end of X.
No, wait, she had every reason to kill that old bat. She murdered all her porno making friends! It’s so hard to get good help these days, or good to get hard help these days. All the same, Maxine, despite being somewhat innocent, and having free cocaine all the time, seems somewhat traumatised by her previous experiences, so much so that she doesn’t seem that concerned with the murders happening around her right now.
She says nothing to the cops (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan, playing characters fully aware that they’re playing shitty cops in a parody of a slasher thriller, who even comment on their performances), she doesn’t tell her Hollywood people, she only belatedly notices that anyone who tells her they’re going to a party in the Hollywood Hills, just under the sign, dies horribly.
And then there’s a jerk private investigator (Kevin Bacon, so sleazy, sleazier than ever, even sleazier than that film he played a paedophile in) who keeps trailing her and taunting her, and it’s almost like he’s daring her to kill him.
So many cameos. And there’s even the great Giancarlo Esposito playing her creepy agent with his terrible wig and sweaty suits. He, like many people in this flick, looks like he’s straight out of an actual low budget porno/horror film from the 80s. They ALL do. That’s the whole point, I guess.
As for who is killing all the attractive people in Hollywood? It’s a person so obvious that it constitutes no mystery whatsoever, even when we have no idea who that person really is, and how we’re meant to think about what he’s doing, which is nothing.
I mean, if we’re going to put together a homage that satirises how terrible the people were, who were trying to scare people about what songs they should be allowed to listen to or what books they could read or films they could watch, or what games they should play, well, okay. Is there anything new to say about how hypocritical those dinguses were? I don’t think so, and it doesn’t make for interesting drama, or entertaining horror schlock either.
If you’re going to tell me that cultural conservatives and the kinds of people who are sent berserk over what other people are allowed to read or look at are easily led fuckwits, I’m going to yawn, not nod my head and say, “yeah, man, nailed it.”
After a while, the difference between someone taking a shit on your lounge room coffee table and someone who does it ironically is pretty much non-existent, so this flick exists less as a satire of the things it’s satirising, and instead just exists as a recently made retro example of the thing it’s mocking. That’s enough, for some people, but it doesn’t exactly work for me, not this time.
Maxine’s character and performance are solid throughout; I just wish the flick was as grand as her ambitions, and met her at that level, instead of just being serviceable.
6 times I am not now nor have I ever been nostalgic for the 80s at all out of 10
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“We've got one more set up for the dream sequence. Come see your head.” – um, okay - Maxxxine
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