A Star Is Porn

Savor the mouthfeel of 1980s sleaze, as grindhouse gourmand Ti West serves up a nostalgia-soaked selection of nasty delights from the louche side of the Reagan era. MaXXXine is the strongest and concluding chapter of a time-tripping meta-cinema troika—starting with X and continuing with Pearl—in which the genre-wallowing auteur exercises an impressively, if detrimentally, fetishistic reverence for past film stylings. Turns out that, in this trilogy of terror, the third time’s the demonic charm.

The ’70s-era meta-slasher X struck me as too studied and oddly mannered for a horror film, despite its delicious suggestion that geriatric copulation is the most shocking aspect of a porno-tinged bloodbath. And its prequel Pearl, set in 1918, came off as an uneven, cartoonishly Sirkian pastiche origin story for X’s psychotic horndog country granny. But MaXXXine is a lively hoot, finally throwing off the Texan farmyard antics of Pearl Douglas (Goth) and pushing them to the margins while Maxine Minx (also Goth) takes center stage and struts her stuff in tawdry Tinseltown.

MaXXXine ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Ti West
Written by: Ti West
Starring: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Halsey, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Bacon
Running time: 104 mins

The eager porn starlet from X is now pushing 33, a California girl juggling her jug-shaking gigs at places like peep show palace Hollywood Star World and all-nude, LAX-adjacent gentlemen’s club The Landing Strip. She may sell sex, but her burning desire is to go legit and land a part in a real movie—in this case, the lead role in low-budget horror sequel The Puritan II. Lots of big-name actors started in horror. Why not a skin-flick beauty? Besides, to paraphrase our heroine, she’s Maxine fucking Minx. And she’s gonna be a star! 

Unless, of course, she falls victim to the Night Stalker, a serial killer haunting the streets of satanic-panic L.A. And when Maxine’s colleagues start popping up on slabs in the city morgue, with pentagrams carved into their faces, two homicide detectives (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) start sniffing around trying to figure out why she’s the common denominator.

But she’s not going to let a string of murders dampen her chance at breaking away from adult entertainment—especially when ambitious British writer-director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) is determined to make sure The Puritan II is a B-movie with A-ideas. “We’re not some video nasty,” she snorts. “We’re theatrical.” And she’s just as eager to showcase Maxine, whose audition struck her as “raw, real, and ruthless.” Now that Maxine has made it into the belly of the beast, Bender needs to know: “Are you ruthless?” 

Unlike the previous two films, MaXXXine seems to be the film West was born—or should I say dying?—to make from the start, an homage to the thrillingly explicit days of home video, when the VCR opened up a Pandora’s Box of pleasures once suppressed by the tenets of theatrical exhibition and now perversely available in every home. Rambo under the same roof as Behind the Green Door? That’s entertainment!

 There’s a sense of giddiness to West’s approach, both narratively and formalistically, as he toggles between widescreen lensing that feels like grimy 35mm and boxy standard-def NTSC. In one of the film’s cute conceits, flashbacks are even degraded into video-quality memories. Just the act of watching MaXXXine will give Proustian vibes to Gen Xers that spent way too much time roaming video rental stores or watching televangelists deliver melodramatic screeds. 

West even casts ’80s teen idol Kevin Bacon—bringing O.G. horror cred as one of the many slaughtered campers in the first Friday the 13^th—here playing a supporting role as a grimy amoral private dick from New Orleans. His eventual death—along with a moment beforehand when Maxine repeatedly punches him in the face with a key-studded fist—is a high point in the film, as are other deliciously lowbrow moments like her stomping on the testicles of a naked assaulter or cutting lines of cocaine with a SAG card. 

West’s movie is at its best when it practically bear-hugs the pop-culture references, all set to lovingly curated synth classics like Mary Jane Girl’s “In My House,” Animotion’s “Obsession,” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasure Dome.” That last cue will no doubt stir cinephiles’ memories of the “Relax” needle drop in Brian De Palma’s 1984 softcore suspenser Body Double, itself a lurid embodiment of all the thematic fixations in MaXXXine. West even invokes De Palma in one stylized slay that feels nearly lifted almost shot for shot from Dressed to Kill—not to mention the black-gloves adorning the film’s mysterious killer.

Which is why MaXXXine never completely soars, with a story that’s more tickled with self-impressed throwback references than it is giving agency and depth to a fundamentally passive protagonist navigating a hyper-violent, uber-sexualized world. Listening to Casey Kasem intoning John Parr’s “Man in Motion” as the chart-topping hit from St. Elmo’s Fire is lots of trivial fun, but what would really be memorable is having a main character who can prove herself to be more than just someone who’s great at emphatically insisting that she’s Maxine fucking Minx.