Watching Maxxxine sort of feels like winning the lottery but finding out that you get paid in chocolate coins. We’ve been at this long enough to have the receipts for X and the surprise follow up to X, Pearl, and I think a discussion about the end of the trilogy necessitates some analysis of the first two films.
Part of the appeal of the first two films was always the fact that they had been filmed simultaneously, a kind of treasure box hidden inside a porno disguised as a horror film (*checks internet history for appropriate shareable links*). The casting of Jenna Ortega at the beginning of her rise to mega stardom along with the fun music star Kid Cudi complete with Euphoria-esque musical interlude, and, of course, the batshit crazy double role for Mia Goth all amounted to a quirky maelstrom of complimentary but not always aligned incentives to see X: much like the movie as a whole which split along lines of horror fans and porn fans, the casting gave something for everyone in terms of opening up storylines for porn tropes like the interracial plot, the religious ingenue, the sexed up old lady with violent kinks, etc., etc., etc. Setting the film in the 70s gave the story some room to comment on racial tensions, on the backlash to free love and loosening cultural mores about sex and sexuality, and it did so at a time when contemporary assaults on women’s bodies and “non-marital sex” were being directed by people in power.
So, that was X, and then Ti West made Pearl, which was mostly just about how much of a drag disabled people are and how to torture and kill them. But also there’s some element of the meta-filmmaking and film-viewing experience: the allusions to the Golden Age of horror, the projection room, and her bid to escape her restrictive life by auditioning to be an actress. And we really, really doubled down on Mia Goth as the primary mover of the film, did away with a musical performer, and toyed with the fact that the audience was familiar with the set. The post-credits reveal that a third film had been planned was also a sort of jumping of the shark that I think probably won’t feel as amazing in retrospect.
So what’s happening in Maxxxine? Maxxxine in all ways casting reveals itself to be the most grandiose and ambitious of any of the films. It’s like the production acquired this magnetic quality that drew in big stars through its own gravity: Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, and Elizabeth Debicki, music stars Halsey and Moses Sumney. The effect of it felt like a return to form in X, but the delivery is a lot more uneven and disappointing. Sumney’s black gay best friend character is actually kind of fun and adds a dimension of intersectionality to the film that is lacking at least a little bit from the original two. His murder is one of the most stylized and campy too. But Halsey, as I had been informed by horror Friends who saw it opening weekend, is barely in the film and doesn’t really add very much on her own in any way. Debicki also seems like a weirdly extraneous character. She doesn’t advance the plot at all and mostly plays an aggrieved and mean but also stressed out and constantly on guard female director in a man’s world, spouting advice and dispensing grains of explication when necessary. Giancarlo Esposito’s wig out to get an Oscar nom for best supporting actor, but the real winner of this movie is Kevin Bacon fans and family members, because whoa boy does he have presence in this film. His accent is absolutely insane as is his character, an amoral detective for hire assisting a lunatic serial killer.
Maxxxine returns to its commentary of the porn scene and has a few gags (!) for the female gaze of porn sets, which is entertaining, but not maintained for any sustained amount of time. Maxine Minx herself has a few moments of brilliance, like in her entrapment scene depicted above, but beyond that she’s underutilized in her own movie, probably because she was so busy curb stomping her coworkers during the filming?
I went with three Friends who had seen either one or none of the previous films, a fact that they gleefully revealed during our second drink minutes before the start of the film, and they all came out of the film very satisfied with how pleasant the film is as a standalone, which made me think that maybe the film is better if you don’t have the expectations of Ti West’s covid project in your head while watching this. Maxxxine on its own feels like a cool, campy little slasher, but when compared to the last two years of connected titles, it’s a bit of a letdown.
