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MaXXXine, the third (and weakest) instalment of Ti West’s impossibly hip X horror trilogy, starts as it means to go on: with a riot of 1980s references. Stay tuned for New Coke and Police Academy billboards. It’s 1985, and Mia Goth, reprising her role as porn star Maxine Minx, sashays into an audition. Her Southern drawl appeals to Liz (Elizabeth Debicki), the director of The Puritan 2.
Maxine’s big break out of the adult film sector seems certain. But then her friends show up dead and branded with Satanic symbols. Leering gold-toothed private eye John Labat (Kevin Bacon) has an incriminating videotape that can place Maxine at the grisly unsolved murders depicted in X. His mysterious employer remains offscreen, save for a sinister pair of squeaky leather black gloves.
Director Ti West’s stylish, uneven dialogue with the subgenre known as “video nasties” features one classic 1980s slasher death and lots of meta-movie chatter. Maxine, like Goth, is starring in a “B-picture with A ideas”.
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Unhappily, those ideas are never as coherent as the Disneyfied derangement of Pearl, the second film of West’s trilogy. Between shoehorned sequences at the Bates Motel on the Universal back lot, Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale’s sidelined police investigation, and Debicki’s haphazardly stressed delivery, this is a collection of distractions, not subplots.
For all the clutter, there’s nothing as fun as X’s mechanical alligator jump scares or Pearl’s scarecrow humping. And then there’s the problematic big reveal. We won’t spoil it: we’ll leave you to experience the jump-the-shark moment for yourself.
Goth remains fiercely committed to the bit. West, a talented, ideas-driven film-maker, makes merry with contemporaneous tropes, yet falls well short of the substance or sleaze that defined Cruising, Hardcore, or the other films referenced throughout.
