Director Ti West and his acting collaborator, Mia Goth, have managed to accrue enough hip cachet with their porn/slasher hybrid trilogy to attract a higher class of supporting cast: Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, Elizabeth Debicki, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Monaghan, and even Halsey do grunt work as colorful side characters in the concluding chapter of the series, which sees the 70s-80s adult film star, Maxine Minx (Goth), attempt to scale the Hollywood heights by getting cast in a sleazy establishment-certified horror film being directed by a haughty Brit auteur with visions of John Carpenter crossover grandeur, albeit in the opposite direction. Since MaXXXine is pure, shameless 80s pastiche, there isn’t a whole lot of aesthetic and subtextual distance between what this auteur, Elizabeth Bender (Debicki), is trying to do and what West accomplishes with tongue stuffed implacably in cheek, which gives the viewer pause: Is West making fun of me? I guess you’d have to ask someone who was fully awake to the cultural charms of the 80s, because I mostly slept-walked through the decade.

Maxine, you’ll remember, was the only survivor of the porn production in the first movie, X, that was set upon by the psychotic old lady (also played by Goth), who, as we learned in the second part of the trilogy, Pearl, was sent over the edge when her own dreams of youthful stardom were railroaded by men who only wanted sex. Maxine, now ensconsed successfully in L.A.’s sex business underground (she drives a vintage Mercedes), attempts to break out, but there is a shadowy figure stalking her who knows what happened at Pearl’s farm back in Texas. Is this figure the Night Stalker serial killer who’s all over the news? Does his threat to expose her dirty secret through his private dick proxy (Bacon) have any traction? It’s difficult to say, since Maxine is conceived as such a badass, both socially and professionally, that you can only assume the stalker really doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. 

But that would be assuming too much, because West’s script is so flimsy in terms of motivation and premise-building that you can’t tell where the 80s slasher parody ends and the clever sendup of Hollywood attitude starts. It’s not so much the grotty special effects and the cheesy hard rock guitar score, which are fun in their own diminished way, but rather the sense that West and Goth don’t really seem to have any original ideas of their own. Unlike X, which at least made an effort to scope the close kinship between porn and horror, MaXXXine has nothing on offer except winking jokes about how everyone in L.A. is a failed Hollywood bizzer, including the actual bizzers themselves. Had West focused on that aspect of the movie industry, he might have made something truly terrifying.

Opens June 6 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

MaXXXine home page in Japanese

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