REVIEWS FOR TI WEST'S MAXXXINE FIND DE PALMA IN THE MIX
"BRIAN DE PALMA'S TWISTY EROTIC THRILLERS SIMPLY INFORM THE MOOD"
Kim Newman, EMPIREIn Ti West’s 1979-set slasher movie X, Mia Goth played would-be porn star Maxine and elderly killer Pearl. Spinning the film out into a triptych rather than a trilogy, the 1919-set Pearl was about the younger days of the murderess, while MaXXXine is set in 1985 and catches up with what the final girl of the Texas Porn Star Massacre did next in her life. Eventual binge-watchers will notice the way elements recur with variations across all three movies — something Maxine does at the climax mirrors what Pearl did in her film. In a moment of metatextuality which functions also as a scare scene, Maxine has her head coated with goo as a make-up artist makes an impression to be used to create a severed-head prop for a dream sequence. She is transformed by dripping white gunk into the ghost image of old Pearl, who actually told her she would end up looking like her. The fact that Mia Goth must have been through this process in real life to create the make-up mask which transformed her into Pearl in X adds a further layer to a film which is in some danger of becoming too clever by half, but consistently pulls back to deliver a cinematic coup or reveal another facet of determined protagonist Maxine. Goth’s not-exactly-admirable survivor-type is always centre-screen.
X was a homage to the grainy, gritty, sunstruck look shared by 1970s porn of the Deep Throat variety and the down-home horror-movies often made by the same film students at a different step in their careers. Pearl was a sumptuous candy-Technicolor recreation of the style of classic Hollywood melodramas, musicals and small-town nostalgia movies, with a lush, sweeping old orchestral score. It’s a risk to make a series where every instalment looks and sounds different, but West has been a master of evoking bygone styles since his homage to 1970s TV movies, The House Of The Devil.
In Maxxxine, the series moves away from the made-in-New Zealand Texas farmhouse with adjacent alligator lake of the first two pictures into a 1980s Hollywood which is at once scuzzy and vibrant. With perfect needle drops — Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’, Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ — and an array of authentic costumes and hairdos, this inhabits video-rental space with Abel Ferrara’s Fear City, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A. — not to mention a whole lot of non-auteurist exploitation pictures like the teenage-hooker classic Angel trilogy, the cult-of-killers cop flick Cobra and the extraordinary mad-movie-buff film Fade To Black. MaXXXine revisits the Hollywood locations of some of these VHS gems and is packed with film Easter eggs: an early alleyway threat comes from a stalker dressed as Buster Keaton, and a key backlot chase scene has Mia Goth chased by Kevin Bacon through the Bates Mansion created for Psycho II.
X and Pearl both take their time getting to the very gory horrors — that house façade isn’t the first reference to crime story-turned-gothic Psycho in the series. MaXXXine is more upfront and ’80s about things, with a simmering air of menace and regular atrocities as Maxine sticks to her plan of getting out of adult movies into mainstream cinema, despite bodies dropping all around and a sinister figure out to coerce her into appearing in yet another type of film with an even more twisted agenda.
Alison Willmore, VultureWhere X riffed on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Pearl was inspired by Sirkian Technicolor, MaXXXine owes a debt to Body Double, which was also set in the blurry borderlands between disreputable B-movies and adult film. As touchpoints go, it’s a pretty good one. Like Brian De Palma’s tawdry-gorgeous thriller, MaXXXine takes place in a city where seediness and luxury coexist, and where a mansion in the Hollywood Hills is just a quick ride away from the peep show where Maxine works when she isn’t shooting porn. The trick isn’t accessing those elite spaces — the women Maxine meets, played by the likes of Halsey and Lily Collins, are always headed off to parties in the hills — but proving you belong there as more than just a party favor for powerful guests. The first time we see Goth in the film, she’s a silhouette strutting through the massive doors of a soundstage: a literal gate, behind which are sitting the metaphorical gatekeepers for whom she’s about to try out. One of them is Elizabeth Bender (an iceberg-lettuce-crisp Elizabeth Debicki), the director of the first Puritan, whose declarations about wanting to make a sequel that’s a “B movie with A ideas” are clearly meant to be self-referential, as well as self-deprecating. But that’s the irritating thing about West’s project — it’s not a compliment to say that it’s easy to imagine the three films being projected simultaneously on opposing walls of a museum display, because they feel more like an installation to be sampled than stories that need to be experienced one after another. West knows how to move a camera and light a scene, to be sure. When the lens glides from Maxine’s shitty apartment building to follow the departure of her best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), on a skateboard, and then across the street to the figure staking her out in a car across the street, the sheer artfulness of the shot is its own satisfaction. But MaXXXine, like X and like Pearl, is more focused on being in conversation with the horror genre than it is on its audience. When the film arrives at the conclusion that being a star requires a helping of psychopathy, it’s Goth who’s able to make that feel like something other than a glib punchline.
Tim Grierson, Screen DailyX paid tribute to horror films of the 1970s, while the 1910s-set Pearl slyly referenced live-action Disney pictures, but MaXXXine is not as entertaining an homage to its cinematic influences. Cinematographer Eliot Rockett and production designer Jason Kisvarday provide West with an appropriately seedy and sun-soaked L.A., but the film fails to cleverly embody 1980s’ cinematic hallmarks, its Brian De Palma allusions fairly obvious. Still, those who enjoy period hits from ZZ Top and Kim Carnes will be happy to hear them blasting on the soundtrack. West seems more invested in the political forces at work during the era, noting the rise of religious conservatism in America which led to the entertainment industry being accused of promoting godlessness, even Satanism. No surprise, then, that the name of the film that will be Maxine’s big break is willfully blasphemous — and that the mysterious killer brands his victims with a pentagram, the mark of the devil. Incorporating archive clips of Ronald Reagan, MaXXXine seeks to spotlight a period in which horror stood in defiance of the Moral Majority, a reactionary movement that sought to demonise art it found abhorrent.
Unfortunately, that commentary is never especially insightful and, likewise, West has little success critiquing Hollywood (both the city and the industry) as a place that lures in aspiring performers only to exploit them. Maxine encounters cliched characters wherever she turns and, while some are meant to be parodies of specific types — such as Bacon’s no-good New Orleans detective — neither the script nor the performances contain enough wit to make the satire stick. Debicki plays a blandly intimidating film director, while Monaghan and Cannavale are one-note cops in search of the killer. (The meagre running joke about Cannavale’s character is that he wanted to be an actor, delivering every line with extra gravitas as a way to hold onto his thwarted aspirations.) Even worse, the film’s expected gross-out violence is subpar, rarely offering the liberating rebuke to the era’s uptight handwringing.
Damon Wise, Deadline And now a public service announcement for the genre-savvy: know upfront that the trailer is something of a bum steer; Brian De Palma’s twisty erotic thrillers simply inform the mood, and you won’t get very far trying to guess who the teasingly little-seen killer is simply from their androgynous black get-up. In the same way, it’s really not an homage to Italian giallo; with the exception of one very bloody set-piece, this isn’t a murder-mystery in the usual sense. In fact, the reveal is really quite disappointing after the hell-for-leather lead-up of X and Pearl, both of which freely experimented with storytelling techniques and film grammar to sell the sizzle as well as the steak. Surprisingly, despite an obvious nod to the Mitchell brothers’ 1972 porno-chic breakout Behind the Green Door, West is very traditional this time round, literally romping through the Universal studio lot in a journey that will take Maxine to the Psycho house and, well… is that really the Back to the Future town square set?
These incremental moments build up, because — and this may be complete conjecture — West doesn’t seem to be that interested in wrapping up his trilogy with yet another pastiche horror movie. Sometimes clumsily but more often not, MaXXXine has things to say about the objectification and humiliation of women in Hollywood, as actors and directors, and, alongside that, the belittling of horror as a genre too. As the figurehead for this, Debicki is a little on the nose with her delivery, demanding perfection while not exactly exuding passion, but it’s hard not to see where she’s coming from when she gives Maxine an on-set pep talk, insisting, “We’ll prove them all wrong together in a beautiful f*cking bloodbath.”
Christina Newland, i NewsTinseltown, 1985. Maxine Minx is a porn star who wants to be a legit movie actor, but this is a horror movie by the schlocky Ti West, so you ought to adjust your expectations accordingly. West – swapping mediums and using scratchy VHS to match the film’s period, as well as splashy cuts and Brian De Palma split-screens – leans heavily into the 80s setting. As an opening montage informs us, this is the era of the video nasty, evangelical boycotts of pornography, and a serial killer known as the Night Stalker haunting the streets of the city: Maxine (Mia Goth) is in a pressure cooker. MaXXXine is the splashy third instalment in Ti West’s loose trilogy of self-conscious period-set horror flicks, following on from his slasher movies X and Pearl. It’s also the weakest of the three. Each film shares a lead actress – the alien-eyed, strange, baby-voiced powerhouse that is Mia Goth – and themes around stardom, sex, fame, violence, and the act of filmmaking. Each are glossy pastiches of movie history, which makes them both great fun and not particularly deep.
Here, Maxine is a self-invented star of the early home video porno craze, working out of Los Angeles after discarding a traumatic past back in the heartland. (We soon realise she is the previous protagonist of X, who was the sole survivor of a homicidal rampage).
Owen Glieberman, Variety“X,” the first movie in Ti West’s grungy but elevated artisanal-trash horror franchise (it’s been billed as a trilogy but may yet produce further installments), was an unusually effective stab at recreating the ’70s farmhouse-turned-charnel-house vibe of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” spiced with the fleshpot voyeurism of ’70s porn. For a retro slasher movie, it was a novelty and a curio. The insane killer was an old farm wife suffering from erotic frustration — played, under a ton of make-up, by Mia Goth, the same actress who played one of the film’s porn performers. The movie was leagues better than your average “Chain Saw” knockoff, yet it never quite transcended the slasher formula. It was a psycho thriller crafted with a fanboy filmmaker’s encyclopedic rigor. But “Pearl,” a prequel that West shot directly after “X” (it was released just six months later in 2022), took a startling leap. It told the backstory of that ancient farm lady — who, in “Pearl,” was now an apple-cheeked lass living on her family’s Texas homestead in 1918, obsessed with becoming a star in the racy new world of motion pictures.
Goth played her once again, only this time the character was vibrant and driven, alive with aspiration — and the movie took us inside all that to the point that when she starts to kill people, you have the rare sensation of empathy for a demented slasher. Goth had a seven-minute confessional monologue in “Pearl” that was like something delivered by Liv Ullmann. And yet, wielding a pitchfork as a murder weapon, she was also terrifying. The movie was about madness, about the dawn of feminism, about “Carrie” and “The Wizard of Oz,” about the bloody horror of dreams denied. And Mia Goth proved that she’s a wonder of an actress. “Pearl” was a quantum leap over “X,” and it made you think: If this is Part 2, what does Ti West have up his sleeve for the third installment?
That movie, which opens July 3, is called “Maxxxine,” it’s set in 1985, and it’s named for the character Goth played in “X,” who is now a noted adult-film actress, Maxine Minx, in the halfway corporatized straight-to-video world of Los Angeles skin flicks. Maxine, like Pearl, longs to be a star. Early on, she auditions for a role in a horror movie called “The Puritan II,” which looks like “The Crucible” redone as a grade-Z blood feast. For her, though, it would be more than a step up. It would be a step toward legitimacy and maybe stardom. Porn stars, at the time, had little to no chance of breaking into mainstream movies, an idea that was at least flirted with when Brian De Palma considered casting the triple-X superstar Annette Haven in “Body Double” (the studio said: over our dead stock portfolio). But in “Maxxxine,” the title character’s yearning to cross over endows her with an underdog fervor.
The way the film presents it, it’s Maxine’s hunger for stardom, her hellbent wish to lift herself out of the trough of the sex industry, that sets her apart. That and her inner fire. And inner fire, as we know from “Pearl,” is something that Mia Goth can really bring. She plays Maxine with a come-hither aggression that’s direct and compelling enough to let us wonder if Maxine could be hardcore porn’s hidden answer to Vivien Leigh.
When a filmmaker recreates an old genre, to the point that it’s obvious he has steeped himself in it, it’s generally a sign that he’s aiming high, trying to make “cinema.” That’s certainly true of Ti West. In his up-from-low-budget-gone-A24 way, he’s as obsessed with old movies as Quentin Tarantino; he riffs on them as a fetishistic act of cult homage. But just as Tarantino can draw on the lowest of grindhouse muck, West, in “Maxxxine,” applies his genre-movie scholasticism to a form that seems, on the face of it, to be the definition of disreputable: the ’80s sexploitation thriller — the kind of badly lit product, featuring women in heavy-metal lingerie and psycho stalkers who are like leering stand-ins for the men in the audience, that no one ever pretended was any good. De Palma drew on some of these films too, but “Maxxxine” is less contempo De Palma than a knowing nod to the movies you used to see stacked up in VHS bargain bins in convenience stores.
Alistair Ryder, The Film StageThese overlapping cases begin intruding on Maxine’s career, and beneath her defiant persona, the horrors of the past are never too far from her mind. And to show this, with his tongue very firmly in cheek, West depicts Maxine on a tour of the Universal lot, outside the Bates Motel, imagining that she’s seeing the ghost of Pearl in the windows of the looming house above, where another cinematic killing spree took place. If directly invoking Psycho will further embolden the horror auteurists who have begun to view West as a hack who adds nothing to his myriad influences, then directly drawing narrative parallels between it and X––which should be uncontroversial on paper, considering the well-trod slasher template Hitchcock forged––will turn them apoplectic. It’s not even the only time a set piece takes us to the Bates Motel, and if such shameless Hitchcock pastiche feels designed to get his biggest critics labeling him a poor man’s Brian De Palma, well, West is self-aware enough to be on the defensive before a single blow has been struck. Why else would there be a Frankie Goes to Hollywood-scored nightclub scene if not to tip the hat to Body Double?
Shakyl Lambert, CGM Backlot MagazineBefore the film starts, there’s a quote from legendary actress Bette Davis: “Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.” Funnily enough, that quote clues into why the movie didn’t work much for me. To West’s credit, like his previous two films, MaXXXine displays his knowledge of the aesthetics that each film inhabits, in this case, the 80s slashers and Giallo films. In particular, MaXXXine plays very similar to Brian De Palma’s 1984 erotic thriller Body Double. That film was one that De Palma made in response to the criticism he was receiving for his other erotic thrillers at the time, and he intentionally went all out with sexuality and violence. It seems like in making a movie that wants to be as sleazy as those thrillers; you need elements of sleaziness in your real-life personality. West doesn’t have that, and as a result, MaXXXine feels way too sanitized and glossy to stand alongside those thrillers.
Matt Donato, Daily DeadWest’s Los Angeles “sleaze noir’ is a seedy haven for murder, treachery, and broken dreams. At first glance, it’s giving Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, and Nicolas Winding Refn; Los Angeles is burning behind VHS static that recreates the experience of watching outdated tubular televisions. An unnamed criminal with squeaky black leather gloves slices victims open in West’s horror-forward scenes, while procedural true crime inspirations — Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale play persistent detectives — chase a dangerous whodunit. It’s West doing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by way of Deep Red, but also daffily unserious at parts, which can become a tonal mishmash. Maxxxine is pulled in too many thematic directions, trying to wrap a young starlet’s evolution from zero to hero, while also encapsulating 1980s Los Angeles’ lawless Wild West period. There are details that remain vivid, like Maxine evading John by sprinting into the backlot Psycho house, or pentacles seared into dead flesh — but also an overall glitzy shallowness. Giallo notes are muted, horror fierceness takes a backseat, and the dopey B-movie sheen that promotes illicit entertainment reads like caricature exaggerations. Where X had me on the edge of my seat, enraptured by tension, Maxxxine struggles with momentum. West never quite delivers a soup-to-nuts slasher, or fulfilling Night Stalker caper, lost in Maxine’s ascension to a detriment.
Robbie Collin, The TelegraphWest has set his film in 1985, when another (real-life) killer, known as the Night Stalker, was terrorising LA – and there is something of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in its bleary mingling of fiction and fact. The photography by longtime West collaborator Eliot Rockett evokes the era with vivid ease: his hot colours and grimy surfaces leave a residue, but one you don’t necessarily want to wash off. The style is impeccable. The substance, not so much. Perhaps after Pearl, MaXXXine is simply a victim of heightened expectations, but it has little of its predecessor’s mischief or steely psychological brinksmanship. Instead, we get a jumble sale’s worth of homages and an odd and eventually derivative stop-start storyline, in which you often feel as if you’re watching Goth literally walk from one subplot to the next.
The references are enormous fun: we get Psycho’s Bates Motel as an unlikely refuge, Kevin Bacon as a scummy private eye with a Chinatown nose plaster, and lashings of Brian De Palma’s Body Double and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. West clearly adores these films, and in an ideal world, MaXXXine would have joined them in the canon. In the event, though, it’s content to lust after them from the confines of the peep show booth, nose pressed up against the grubby glass.
