In retrospect, it’s hard to understate how much of an aberration X was for Ti West, not because it was a good movie (he made a few of those) but because it was a wild multiplex-filling success. He’d arrived much too early on the scene to be caught up in the elevated horror wave — Blumhouse was two years out from Paranormal Activity and four years out from a return on their investment, and boutiques like 24 and NEON didn’t even exist, when he premiered his first feature at SXSW in 2005 — and was always an uncomfortable standard-bearer for the thinking man’s scary movie maker, even when House of the Devil, with its retro-styling and fantastic poster made waves on the arthouse-midnight circuit. West has never lacked ambition, and it’s something I have always respected him for, even if I’ve never been more than a mild fan of his work.
His features following that success were of varying quality but saw him experiment with different styles (a Western, a ghost story, a found-footage Jonestown riff), and after a lengthy hiatus, X served as a second act reset. It was fiendishly simple: a bunch of kids go to a weird Texas farmhouse to shoot a porno picture and get chopped up by the youth-envious and sexually repressed ancient owners of the farm. The kills came at a quick pace with a decent amount of artistry, Mia Goth got to be Mia Goth (twice over, in fact), and it all built up to a pretty funny single-line denouncement. Assuming West would follow his previous patterns, he’d duck and weave genres, using the success to rope-a-dope A24. But when Pearl and MaXXXine were announced, the stakes placed on a relatively unassuming and thread-bare horror picture were raised, and X proved to be the seed for a newfound franchise, as ill-conceived as that might have been.
You can see the hallmarks of West’s success reflected on screen in MaXXXine – his cast is stacked to the nines, there was a lot of presumably very expensive location shooting (including on the Universal Studios lot), and the attention paid to recreating ’85 LA could only have been the result of a painstaking process. It’s significantly more expensive than Pearl, which leaned heavily on Goth’s exaggerated and operatic performance to mask the genuinely intimate (re: cheap) period setting, and it’s intended to serve as the finale to the trilogy. Go big or go home, as the axiom says, and West makes sure that you see that every dollar was well-spent when you’re on Vine or watching a head explode via a slug from a sawed-off. It fits the general milieu of the film thematically – this is by far the biggest budget West has ever worked with, and it’s the closest he’s come to the folding chair on the soundstage inside one of those studio lots (though I imagine he’s turned down more offers to direct ill-conceived reboots than one could ever comprehend). This is largely the same situation that his lead, Maxine Minx (Goth) finds herself in, after some six years of trudging through various forms of sex work in LA and making a name for herself in porn. But she wants more than VCR infamy, or to be doing peep shows all of her life — not that she minds it or thinks she’s above it, but she has goals and ambition. That was true even when she was a little kid, a born performer who was the apple of her preacher father’s eye in Texas until she decided God wouldn’t give her a decent rate on a loan for a Benz and chose to explore other financing options.
When she finds out she’s going to be the lead in a genuine studio horror picture, a sequel to a video nasty entitled The Puritan that will be helmed by a stuffy yet encouraging director (Elizabeth Debecki, whose shoulder pads are impressive), what should be the best day of her life is quickly undercut by a reminder of what she’s running from. A videotape is left at her door, full of footage of her unreleased debut, the one that had a body count and was previously kept under lock and key in the Texas Rangers’ evidence vault. She tries to press on and get used to her new environment, but things just keep happening. Some of her friends – fellow sex workers — are found dead near the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, with pentagrams burned into their now-decaying flesh. A pair of LAPD homicide detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Canavale) begin prying into her personal life, trying to solve those murders, as well as those of the Night Stalker, whose presence casts a pallor over the sunny skies (more on that later). Worst of all, a scuzzy Nawlins PI (Kevin Bacon, who is having the time of his life as he always does when he gets to play a goofball heel) is on her tail, and is connected to whomever sent her the tape. As the pincers of her past start to close in around her, Maxine realizes there’s only one person she can really trust in a situation like this: her agent (Giancarlo Esposito, sporting a genuinely hilarious wig and a fantastic mean mug). Oh, shit – I mean, herself.
I’m gonna get negative in a minute, but I do want to say that MaXXXine is genuinely quite entertaining for its first two acts. West and Goth are a really fantastic pairing when they’re working in service of a breezier tone, which is why X worked so well — Goth got to do her thing as the starlet and the hag, and West got to make it interesting cinematically and occasionally resonant. There is some of that here, like the first scene in which we get some of that ol’ fashioned blood-n-guts. It’s built around a fabulous pun, one realized when one of the impersonators on the street near Grauman’s tries to pull some shit on her in a dark alleyway and finds himself minus a pair of significant assets. This got a legitimate hearty laugh out of me, and much of the rest of those two acts — especially when Bacon, dressed specifically like a Bourbon Street JJ Gittes, or Esposito were involved — was of a similar quality if not extremity. Bacon himself is actually a pretty good high-water mark for the film, as once he’s gone, the problems begin to crop up and become insurmountable. A lot of this is third act stuff, which I’ll do my best to talk around, but to say the revelations contained within are disappointing is a massive understatement.
For those hoping that Mia Goth might single-handedly escort Richard Ramirez to the gates of Hell, well — West might have seen as many movies as Tarantino, but the alt-history stones firmly seated on that grandmaster. Its interesting how many locations MaXXXine shares with Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, because if you think any person would qualify for an ass-kicking of similarly righteous proportion, it would be him, and I found myself wishing that West had gone down that route. The one he’s chosen wraps this trilogy up “nicely,” much in the same way George Lucas thought of the now-beloved prequels as poetry — it rhymes with much of the detail we’re given in X about Maxine’s background, which West is just too enamored with. If you’ve ever over-explained a joke to a friend or colleague who starts to cringe midway through, you know what kind of look they can give you in order to get you to stop talking. West, much like me in situations like that, cannot stop himself from finishing every sentence and explaining every last detail. It is fully understandable, and I am very sympathetic as to why — he has never had the opportunity to paint on such a broad canvas and is enamored both with his creation and the fact that people like it as much as they do. He cares deeply about this work and wants to impart its significance to others much like a would-be comedian wants one to understand why a joke that they thought was funny is so.
Now, West has found plenty of folks who are nodding along with him as he explains, or better yet, are people who got the gag the first time around and laughed. I fall into the latter category, which is why I’m frustrated that I’m having the bit delineated for me across two whole feature films that have brought little to the table aside from Goth at her wackiest, decent supporting players doing their best, and the occasionally gory delight. He can’t seem to leave a single one of the grace notes in X unexplored, which robs that film of its potency, and answers questions that, frankly, very few people were asking when they left the theater. Maxine had full arc in that film (and so did Pearl, for what it’s worth), and yet we’ve had solo features for both in which we have had their stories explained to us in near-excruciating detail, as if West wasn’t sure if we were paying close enough attention the first time around, and maybe one more go would help us get it. He does this at the expense of all the other stories he could have told in favor of a “makin’ it in real show business” narrative that yadda-yaddas over all the potential conflicts in the industry at that time (AIDS, for one example, which is also strangely absent from the film’s cultural landscape, or even a hint that Maxine might have been in other B-movies, given that New World Pictures was still in town), but that’s too alienating and, besides, Star 80 was a real bummer. Toss in an additional stylistic element (or gimmick in the case of Pearl), and apparently one has the elements for a modern-day horror trilogy worth of an A24 platform release, something provocative yet empty, like the arthouse equivalent of an upscale restaurant trying to ape the Taco Bell/Cheez-It collaboration for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in there without a BAC well over the legal limit for the drive-thru (and as if perfection needed any additional refining, anyway).
It bums me to no end to say this, because this trilogy (and you know it’s a trilogy, because unless I missed something, Goth is only playing two characters here — a third would have meant another continuation, based on the precedent X set) is full of subjects, settings and performers that I genuinely like and wish that there was more of a presence of in the modern Hollywood-adjacent sphere. But West ends this feature — and with regard to the actual closing minutes of the film, it has multiple potential endings, and chooses the one that retreads everything he’s just shown us, just so that he’s sure people don’t walk away from it with Taxi Driver-style theories about “reality” — with a maximalist setpiece that betrays the intimacy he’d crafted in the first two films for a really mediocre return. If X ended on an orgasmic note, the additions of Pearl and MaXXXine make it seem like the trilogy busted way, way too early, and each attempt to wait it out and get back at it, much like in real life, came with exceptionally diminishing returns to the other involved.