MaXXXine (2024)

The third in the Ti West/Mia Goth trilogy of X and Pearl, this one is a direct sequel to X about the ongoing life of Maxine, the one girl who escaped the murderous farmhouse rampage. Mia's now sporting Natasha Lyonne's look in Orange is the New Black.

The opening "look, it's 1985" montage during the credits is a solid establishing montage. ZZ Top rocking, Dee Snider testifying before congress, satanism on TV, a bunch of warnings about The Night Stalker serial killer, all while proud-stepping Mia marches in to set where she's now a porno superstar.

The world is littered with brown, with an orange film hue, and she drives a cool beige convertible. Because this is 1985, damn it, and they're doing it right. The whole soundtrack is 80s rock. If there's one thing Ti West can do, it's stylishly exaggerated homages to bygone decades.

I'm not a big fan of Ti's split screen obsession. He did it in the other two films, too, which I let pass without mention. It's actually most fitting style-wise in this film, but also serves the least purpose here. No purpose at all, I might say.

Someone tries to mug her in an alley, she gets the upper hand, and squishes his testicles into goop on the filthy L.A. sidewalk. It's unrelated to anything else, except a bit of mood setting about how crummy the streets of 1980s L.A. were, but I think mostly they wanted to do a ball squishing scene.

She receives a VHS copy of the porno they shot in X in the mail. How does anyone have a copy of that? How does a copy even exist? They left the film camera behind at the farm! Did the cops develop it and then give it to her? Who would even own the copyright? Since they later establish that the farmhouse murders are considered unsolved, and that the farmers themselves are not known to be the murders, that means the film wouldn't have left police evidence. I don't buy it.

Mia is being stalked by a leather glove-wearing creep who hired a P.I. to track her down. The P.I., none other than Kevin Bacon, follows too closely so she beats the shit out of him with her keys, which do less damage than you would expect. It does nothing to deter him, and they have a fruitless chase scene through a wild west set and up to the Psycho house. The scene is interrupted by a security guard (the gravestone salesman of Late Phases). They renew their cat-and-mouse game later at a dance club, which is all a setup so Mia can kidnap Bacon and crush him to death in his car. What porn star didn't have access to a car crushing machine?

Mia's friends, mostly strippers and porno actresses, are being kidnapped by a secret cabal for what is originally implied to be Videodrome-esque snuff films, but doesn't turn out to be even half as exciting. The cops ask for her help, but are all weird about it and she's all weird about it and, in the end, nobody helps anybody and people keep getting killed. The "Night Stalker" is mentioned constantly as a red herring, but it never actually matters what color the herring is.

X ended with a clip telling us that Mia is the daughter of a TV evangelical preacher. He's the one who has been stalking her and murdering her friends, which is the most obvious conclusion if you remembered that shot from X. He's not alone, he has a whole cult with him. Preacher man yells "IT'LL BE THE CLIMAX OF THE FILM!" at a point that is not the climax of the film, which is rather disappointing.

Even though the cops secretly watched her enter the preacher cult house, they conveniently said "let's wait and see what she does" to give him some time to kidnap and torture her before the cops limply busted in at the last moment and turned it, ever so briefly, in to an 80s action movie shootout. The cops suck and die.

The whole movie never really comes to anything at all. It dropped all the philosophical takes and morality questioning of the previous two movies, and just ran with a straight, humdrum stalker murder mystery. It wasn't slashy enough to be a good slasher, it wasn't mysterious enough to be a good mystery, and it wasn't thrilling enough to be a good thriller. In the end, Mia is in pretty much the same life position as she was in the beginning… aside from losing a few friends, the events of the film don't really change the outcome of her story at all.