Maxxxine Is Ready for Her Close-Up, Mr. West

You can’t help but admire the sheer chutzpah of director Ti West and his partner-in-crime Mia Goth (who I just found out is half-Brazilian on her mother’s side; her full name is Mia Gypsy Mello da Silva Goth) in crafting a trilogy out of what was basically a tribute to the slasher films of the 70s and 80s, particularly the film that catapulted the genre to the stratosphere: Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). West went above and beyond what the genre demands by making each film —X, Pearl (both 2022) and now Maxxxine— tonally different while delivering the requisite amounts of gore that the slasher film demands. If the first film borrowed elements from the standard slasher film, in telling the backstory of the old woman (also played by Goth in extensive body makeup) who made mincemeat out of the small cast and crew of the porn film shot in her barnyard Pearl tipped its hat at the melodramatic films of the 1940s and 1950s (think Douglas Sirk with a knife and a hatchet in each hand) while exploring the hold the quaint invention known as the movies had over many in the early part of the 20th century. Both films made you wonder if Pearl and Maxine are somehow related given their physical resemblance which, alas, this third chapter in the trilogy does not address nor resolve.

Maxxxine, though, may end up being the most misunderstood of all three; for West, more than a horror film, has made a neo-noir with some horror elements added to it to end his trilogy. He has also gone from the bare-bone storytelling shot mostly in one location to a more expansive, louder, nitty gritty, scuzzy world full of deviants, sleazy private detectives, cheap exploitation filmmakers (and pretentious ones as well), prostitutes, drugs and some punks. Maxine Minx drives around these Hollywood streets on a convertible Mercedes Benz with sheer queen of the world gusto, her license plate bearing her first name in full capital letters with two “x” added to it. Maxine is a star in the world of straight-to-video porn but at 33 she wants respectability and roles in far more serious films. The year is 1985, the year the serial killer The Night Stalker terrified the streets of LA, when Tipper Gore mounted a campaign against foul language in rock and roll and rap, and fundamentalist priests and their acolytes hold protests outside Hollywood studios aimed specifically at horror films because they were the Devil’s work.

As the film opens, Maxine is auditioning for a part in the sequel to a popular horror film titled The Puritan. She does not impress the producers nor the casting director but does catch the eye of its director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), who admires the rawness Maxine brings to the reading and her sheer gumption and determination. Elizabeth has a reputation of being too much to handle but once she casts Maxine in her film, she turns into a sort of mentor. Like Burt Reynolds’ character in Boogie Nights, Elizabeth wants to elevate horror films, to give them meaning and sees in The Heretic and Maxine an opportunity to do so. “It’s a B-movie with A ideas,” she tells Maxine (which feels like West taking a cheap shot at the recent trend of “elevated horror” films). She also tells her, after Maxine arrives late to her first day on the set, to take care of all personal business before she returns to set.

And, boy, does Maxxxine have a lot of business to take care of. For the events that took place in that Texas farm in 1979 have come back to haunt her in the form of a videotape featuring scene from the aborted porn film she shot before all hell broke loose, and a scumbag Louisiana detective played with so much flair and sleaze by Kevin Bacon that you wish Ti West would make a film about him and his past cases. Then, there’s that Night Watcher copycat who just targeted two fellow porn actresses and dropped their bodies at a cemetery, bringing two homicide detectives to her doorstep: the no-nonsense Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (the always terrific Bobby Cannavale) who treats his interrogations as if he was auditioning for the role of a detective on a cop show (which the character actually did…or so he claims). As we saw in X, Maxine can be very resourceful and is capable of hitting back as hard as her assailant; but now she has far more tools in her arsenal, particularly her agent and lawyer (Giancarlo Esposito) who knows whom to call when things get hot. Let’s say that one character that is a thorn in Maxine’s plans of career advancement meets the funniest, most lugubrious end of the entire trilogy.

There are shoutbacks both films sprinkled throughout, with the most effective and harrowing being Maxine sitting still as a cast of her head dries while the hazy memories of the events of the first film spring in her mind, and she feels Pearl’s breath behind her as the cast melts and drips. West also fills the film with dozens of easter eggs most of which went unnoticed by me, wrapped as I was by these characters and the A-game this entire cast brings to the endeavor. Debicki is terrific, her toughness both a defense mechanism against Hollywood’s misogyny and a reality check for Maxine. Even Halsey and Lily Collins shine in their small, supporting roles as women who acknowledge that their world is not all glitter but still beats everything else.

But it is Goth who holds this whole quilt together with her sheer energy and knack for segueing from one mood to another, from determination, confidence and even sheer arrogance to fear and apprehension as she finally faces her past in a climactic sequence that evokes the Stallone/Schwarzenegger action flicks of the era and the religious cult that drove most of the plot of the 1987 film adaptation of the TV show Dragnet. Goth also brings a sense of wonder to Maxine as she finally enters the world of “legitimate” filmmaking and drives around a studio lot with Bender, her eyes taking in all the sets, the folks dressed up in costume, Norman Bates’ house and motel, her face expressing a sense of someone who believes to have finally made it. She is living Pearl’s dream. Goth may be the new scream queen. But as she proved in Autumn de Wilde’s perfect adaptation of Emma, Goth is so much more than a scream queen and I hope that, after Guillermo Del Toro’s upcoming adaptation of Frankenstein, she is offered (and accepts) roles in other genres as well as horror.

Is the film perfect? Nope. I wish, for example, that Williams and Torres were not treated as mere plot accessories and that we had seen more of the making of The Puritan 2 (of which, frankly, we get very little). It also lacks some of the dark wit of its predecessors and the daring of Pearl, where gore was kept to a most effective minimum as West deployed his ideas about the power the moving image had and keeps having over us. How many horror films do you know that would give its key character, the slightly unhinged Pearl, a monologue about her dreams? That dare mock the celebrated ending of Luca Guadadigno’s Call Me By Your Name by having Goth sustain, in character, a smile as the end credits roll by? Some of that sheer audacity is missing from Maxxxine and, yet, I can’t help thinking that there is still some mileage to this series. Frankly, given how the studio system treats actresses after they reach a certain age, I would not be surprised if a fourth and final chapter of the series is on its way. Yep, Sunset Boulevard starring an older Maxine Minx in Gloria Swanson’s role…but with more gore.