In 2022’s X, the first of the three-film collaboration between director Ti West and actor Mia Goth, a newbie film crew descends on a Texas farmhouse intending to make a porn flick. Instead, they become the latest victims of Pearl (Goth, in heavy makeup), an elderly woman who bears a strong resemblance to Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho. Only Maxine Minx (Goth, au naturel) escapes the carnage.
In MaXXXine, our eponymous heroine actually visits the Bates Motel — the real one, which still stands on the Universal back lot. She’s there because her Hollywood dreams have begun to come true. But the past just won’t let her go. As Faulkner said, it’s not even past.
West and Goth’s collaboration began on the set of X, when the backstory she had developed for the killer granny Pearl so impressed the director that he decided to make it a prequel. Pearl goes deep into the oppressive patriarchy of rural Texas in the 1920s that twisted a young girl’s ambition into a murderous psychosis. Sixty years later, you can see the same ambition burning in Maxine. It’s 1985, and she’s made it as a porn star in the Valley, the porn industry’s dark mirror image of Hollywood. Now she wants to go legit and get parts in “real” movies, which are filmed on the side of the Hollywood Hills where you can see the big sign.
When she strides into an audition with director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), it’s clear she’s got the juice. She slays her monologue from memory, conjuring tears on demand, which impresses the stoic director. Then, Bender asks Maxine if she would take off her shirt so they could see her tits. Not a problem, says Maxine. Later that day, Maxine gets a call from her agent Teddy (Giancarlo Esposito). She got the part. Now she just has to live long enough to make the movie.
This is more challenging than it might sound. The Night Stalker serial killer is taking victims in Southern California, and dominating the headlines. When Maxine goes to what is hopefully her last day on the job at the peepshow, she’s followed by a mysterious figure in a wide-brimmed hat. After work, her friends Amber (Chloe Farnworth) and Tabby (Halsey) invite her to a big party in the Hollywood Hills, but Maxine declines. She’s got to learn her lines, and it won’t do to show up to her first day on the set with a hangover. It looks like she made the right choice when Amber and Tabby’s bodies are found wrapped in plastic and branded with Satanic pentagrams.
Is it the Night Stalker? Maybe. But there’s more weirdness floating around. Maxine gets a lunch invitation at a swanky restaurant from a man named Labat (Kevin Bacon). He’s a private investigator who has been hired to find Maxine and threatens to frame her with the murders, which have become known as the Texas Porn Star Massacre, unless she goes to meet his client at a swanky address in the Hollywood Hills. Meanwhile, two LAPD detectives, Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (Bobby Cannavale), come calling. They’ve noticed that Maxine seems to be the only person who knows all of the recent victims of the Night Stalker, but who is not yet dead. They offer her protection if she will talk. But they don’t understand who they’re dealing with. Maxine doesn’t need protection. She’s got dreams, a good agent, and her trusty pearl-handled pistol.
Mia Goth’s performances in X and Pearl were the revelation of a major new talent. In MaXXXine, she’s a cocaine-powered whirlwind of ruthless ambition. If she has to kill a few people to see her name in lights on the marquee, then people will die. This might not seem like the makings for a sympathetic character, but her enemies are so much worse. Kevin Bacon drips with sleaze as the utterly amoral private dick sent to retrieve Maxine. When he follows her into a strobe-lit New Wave club where Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” throbs through the sound system, the film shifts into overdrive. From there, West keeps the pedal to the metal.
In true Hitchcock fashion, MaXXXine’s gonzo climax takes place in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. Ti West has studied Hitch and his disciple Brian De Palma’s early-’80s run of erotic thrillers like Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double. But MaXXXine is not a Tarantino pastiche of cool scenes from other people’s movies. There’s a difference between sampling and working in a mode. West and Goth transcend their influences. Yes, these films are in conversation with the past’s lowbrow classics, but they never lose sight of their primary mission: Make it kick ass.
MaXXXine
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