Review: MaXXXine Is a Messy Conclusion to the X Trilogy

Director Ti West has managed to mine a movie franchise out of his flimsy Texas Chainsaw Massacre pastiche X, largely on the strength of lead actor Mia Goth. That film was a mediocre, slow-to-get-going slasher flick made more interesting due to a double-performance from Goth, as both the budding porn starlet Maxine and the elderly villainess Pearl, and a few smart ideas about society's relationship with sexuality. But it was Pearl, the surprise-announced prequel focusing on the title character's younger years, that really impressed. The film earned praise for its dark spin on Douglas Sirk melodramas and early Technicolor films like The Wizard of Oz, but it was Goth's performance — skillfully putting us in the mind of a woman (spoilers) driven to murder and insanity by the isolation and repression of life on a failing Texas farm — that really made it special.

Now we come to MaXXXine, the big-budget third film in the saga that must simultaneously follow the superior film while serving as a direct sequel to the inferior one. It's 1985, and Maxine Minx has put the events of the first film behind her — or tried, at least. She's moved to Hollywood, dyed her hair blonde, and become a major adult film star. As the film opens, she's auditioning for a mainstream movie, gunning for the crossover success that's all too rare for most porn performers. She sees herself less as Marilyn Chambers, who starred in Cronenberg's Rabid before flaming out and heading back into porn, and more like Brooke Shields, who "got naked and now she's in a Muppet movie." In the audition, she impressively powers through a scene directly quoting Pearl's confessional monologue in the earlier film. Then, she obliges when the casting director asks to see her breasts.
That's about as much skin and as much actual acting as we see from Maxine for the entire movie. Getting the part was easy, but keeping it will require confronting the traumas of that night on the Texas homestead that rendered her the "final girl" of her own personal horror film. This involves psychological damage manifesting in real life. In one scene, Maxine is getting a cast made of her head for the film's special effects and imagines the plaster mold as Pearl's lascivious hands jealously fondling her youthful skin. But it mostly involves a shadowy figure sending her mysterious messages, such as newspaper clippings about the "Texas Porn Star Massacre" and tapes of the footage recovered from police evidence. It also involves the Night Stalker, a serial killer whose methods channel the Satanic panic that gripped the decade, who starts targeting Maxine's friends.

It should not be hard to guess that these two elements will eventually come together, and if you have seen X, it probably won't be hard to guess who the Night Stalker really is and why he's targeting Maxine specifically. In fact, the film's tighter connections to X as a direct sequel rather than a side story don't necessarily help it succeed on its own. West places all the action in MaXXXine prior to the star's time on the film set, with her director Elizabeth (Elizabeth Debicki) telling her to "eliminate distractions" before starting work on the film. Wouldn't it have been more interesting if she had had to solve the mystery during the shoot? Would the plaster scene have been as impactful if we didn't know that Pearl's hands were the ones suffocating Maxine in her hallucination?

Maxine's character also suffers in comparison to her older counterpart. Even at her most murderous, Pearl was a sympathetic figure trapped in rural despair, rattling her cage as hard as possible. We see the entirety of her meager existence and watch as she fails, at great cost, to reach her dreams of finally breaking free of the farm.
By contrast, Maxine is ruthless and ambitious without shame, and she tries to handle everything by herself as much as possible. This is because she doesn't want her past to become public and ruin her career, but it also portrays her as a manifestation of the individualism, vulgarity, and success-at-any-cost mentality of the 1980s. We know little of her backstory other than what's in the previous film. Is that enough? Early on, there's a scene where a mugger corners Maxine in a dark alley. She answers by pointing a gun at him, forcing him to strip, and maiming him in a place that really hurts, a Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy. "Do you know what happened to the last guy that tried to kill me?" she drawls, referencing her ordeal at the farm. "I crushed his fuckin' head." (It was actually Pearl's head she ran over while escaping the farm.)

Maxine's mantra, repeated by several characters in all three films and already plastered on T-shirts by A24, is "I will not accept a life I do not deserve." Why does she deserve it? Because she wants it? Because she's talented? Because she toiled away in the porn industry for so long? Because she suffered? Does the violence she underwent in Texas justify the violence she exacts in Tinseltown? Does West approve of Maxine's quest for stardom, or does he want us to look critically at her? It's not really clear. There's a quote attributed to Bette Davis that opens the movie (Kim Cairns' 1981 hit song "Bette Davis Eyes" also plays over the credits) that reads, "In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star." I was also reminded of another line from Thom Yorke: "Ambition makes you look pretty ugly."
The director does take great pains to depict the sordid red-light district of Hollywood Boulevard, hoping to manifest the atmospheric sleaze of films like William Friedkin's Cruising and, in particular, Paul Schrader's Hardcore, to which the film owes significant plot elements. His approach favors volume over substance, though, subbing in a broad pastiche of 1985 and cranking up the period hits until they're deafening, hoping we fail to see the flaws in the film. Some details do shine, however. The soundtrack, featuring the likes of New Order, Animotion, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, is on point, as are the gory slasher-movie kills. But the constant references become distracting. One scene shows Maxine running through a crowd gathered around the body of her friend, slain by the Night Stalker. West decides to follow this tragedy by cutting straight to a can of New Coke (because it's the '80s, get it?) falling from a vending machine, which one of the cops hands to a waiting Maxine in the police station.

Thinking back to the audition in the opening scene, in which Maxine shows her breasts to the producers — but not to us, the audience. Her back is turned to us, denying us the visual pleasure we come to the movies to indulge in. There's also a kernel of an idea about nudity as a commodity. Porn stars, much like movie stars, know that scarcity creates value, and Maxine, seeking legitimacy, knows that movie stars retain their value because they don't take off their clothes as often. So she denies us her body. As with West's other films, MaXXXine has glimmers of great ideas, but in this case, the finished product is too incoherent and overstuffed to let them shine through.

MaXXXine. Starring Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, and Kevin Bacon. Written and directed by Ti West. 104 mins. Rated R. Check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.