Nathan Weinbender reviews "MaXXXine"

NATHAN WEINBENDER:

Ti West’s films are obsessed with other films, and his recent trilogy of horror pastiches starring Mia Goth have paid loving homage to everything from Tobe Hooper to The Wizard of Oz. His latest, MaXXXine, follows the Southern-fried slasher X and its psychological thriller prequel Pearl; if those movies channeled grimy 16mm and oversaturated Technicolor, respectively, this one evokes the bleary crackle of videotape. It’s also the least of the three movies, a film that isn’t so much inspired by other work as totally consumed by them.

It begins in 1985, several years after the events of X. Goth’s Maxine Mink, a survivor of both a cult and a Texas Chainsaw-style massacre, is now working in L.A.’s porn industry. Like so many, she dreams of having her name on a real marquee above the title of a real movie, and it comes partly true when she lands a part in a low-budget horror film called The Puritan II. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, but you’ve gotta start somewhere.

Yes, this is a horror sequel about the making of a horror sequel, and Maxine’s background of religious extremism also comes back to haunt her when her friends start turning up dead with pentagrams carved into their faces.

In its grimy scenes of streetlife and of back rooms and back alleys, MaXXXine (that title, appropriately, is spelled with three X’s) is paying tribute to down-and-dirty L.A. neo-noirs of the ’80s—movies like Angel, Vice Squad and Kinjite. There are also obvious nods to Brian De Palma’s Body Double and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, and the masked, leather-clad killer who stalks everyone looks like he stepped right out of Mario Bava’s pioneering slasher Blood and Black Lace. It even makes a gratuitous trip through the Universal backlot, and has the characters run around the Bates Motel set.

But that’s not all. The script is also a checklist of ’80s hot topics: the Satanic Panic, the adult industry’s transition to home video, the murder spree of the Night Stalker. It’s also cluttered up with supporting characters who practically announce themselves as red herrings: a couple of cops played by Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan, an enterprising film director played by Elizabeth Debicki, an agent and fixer played by Giancarlo Esposito, a sleazy private dick played by Kevin Bacon. For such a lean, mean film, it’s awfully unfocused.

The character of Maxine was part of an ensemble in X, the first in this series, but now that she’s at the center of the story, West doesn’t quite know what to do with her. She’s gone through hell and isn’t afraid to maim and kill, and yet we never get a handle on who she really is. Pearl, which also starred Goth but as the younger version of X’s main villain, was a much more intriguing and harrowing character piece, but it also worked as a fun genre throwback.

There’s no such deftness to MaXXXine, which so often feels like a mere recitation of other scenes and images from other sources. It has been photographed (by West’s regular collaborator Eliot Rockett) and acted with terrific style, and it has a strutting rock soundtrack that puts us right in its era. It’s not a bad movie, exactly, but it’s too beholden to horror history to ever really come into its own.

For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.

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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.