Blast from the Past
By Greg Cwik
MaXXXine
Ti West, U.S., A24
Since the beginning of his career, Ti West has found inspiration in looking backwards. With X, a throwback slasher about a gaggle of fame-hungry twenty-somethings making a porno under the guidance of a sagacious adult film vet and running afoul of the elderly couple from whom they are renting a cabin, West drew influence in aesthetic, tone, and, most vitally, soul from the sordid 1970s horror era, specifically Tobe Hooper and early Wes Craven. West takes gleeful pleasure in shoestring horror filmmaking, its tics and traits products of necessity and enlivened by enthusiastic artistry. However silly and derivative, X, like those films, is a work of love. It won't spawn new breeds of cinema, as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, its most obvious progenitor, did, and doesn't have the pop-intellectual bravado of Scream, the last great slasher, but it is made with care. Pearl, its prequel, about the delusional fantasies of stardom swirling around the head of a troubled, nymphish farm girl in 1918, throbs with the same ardor, but is rooted in a different style, small-town terror in faux-Technicolor. It’s a paean to the dreams of innocents galvanized by the big screen, and an acknowledgment of the death of innocence at the hands of the same movies meant to offer escapism for the downtrodden.
Cinema beckons again, with pretty unfurled fingers, in MaXXXine, a direct sequel to X. Again, West gazes backwards, this time at the reactionary religious hysteria of the 1980s, using the nasty buffoonery of that decade’s American slasher and the colorful elegance of the Italian giallo. It is, as is West’s wont, a passionate pastiche, an arsenic-laced love letter to the movies. Maxine (played by trilogy star and producer Mia Goth), survivor of the Texas skin flick massacre, is haunted by the vestigial horrors of X, and has made a (fake) name for herself in the booming adult film industry. Now she wants to transition to reputable film—or will settle for a horror sequel. Maxine, who pays the rent dancing without enthusiasm at a peep show, meets John Labat (Kevin Bacon), a creepy southern-fried private investigator, who informs her that her past is not quite dead. His unseen employer has plans for the aspiring starlet. And this man, Labat says, cannot be bought; money doesn't matter to him. In true horror movie killer fashion, he will not stop until he gets what he wants. Soon, Maxine has nabbed the role in “The Puritan II,” directed by another dreamer, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki); meanwhile, the bodies of people in Maxine's life begin popping up, mutilated pale flesh festooned with satanic markings.
The killings are redolent of those committed by a real man: Richard Ramirez (already often portrayed in popular culture, recently as a cartoonish rockstar psycho killer in the 1984 season of American Horror Story), who slaughtered at least 13 people in the mid-’80s. They called Ramirez the “Night Stalker,” a name that aptly associates the monster of a man with the supernatural predators of the seventies TV series Kolchak. The killer terrorizes the film’s characters and the whole seedy city of Los Angeles, appearing as a minimalist sketch on TV news, lurking menacingly on everyone’s tongue. Our killer is not Ramirez, but someone imitating him, trying to pull a fast one on the cops. Why is he killing these people? He dresses like a giallo villain and prowls the neon-steeped streets, slicing and dicing. On the case are two annoyingly quippy detectives, played by Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale, who don't really do much.
Maxine, unlike so many classic “final girls,” has no real personality, and Goth plays most of the film in the same simple, unexpressive note. Even though she routinely rails copious amounts of coke, Maxine never vibrates with mania. Her eyes don't twinkle with the hunger for fame; they coruscate darkly with the emptiness that she wants to fill, the vibrant and garish eye shadow giving her an artificial look. She wants to mollify her melancholy with glitz and glam and blow.
Another work of fawning admiration from West, MaXXXine wants to bring us back to the ’80s, to the vibe of Prom Night and Curtains and Pieces and The Prowler, maybe The New York Ripper. The film is preoccupied with its own love of the aesthetics of an antiquated genre, with making it grander and grosser rather than analyzing it. The world of MaXXXine circa 1985, when America had 15,000 active video rental stores, is littered with cassettes, recalling how home video made possible the legacy of what Roger Ebert called “dead teenager movies.” Pearl wanted so badly to be big on the silver screen, but the best Maxine can hope for is splotchy video on 20-inch monitors. Maxine is blackmailed by her own porn film from the ’70s, transferred onto tape, and later finds, in the final fantasies of stardom, solace in talk shows, in interviews, her face beaming on televisions in living rooms around the country. (The best-selling VHS of 1985: Jane Fonda's Workout.) For wayward Maxine, home media offers an alluring hope, and threatens to pull her back into the horrible past that she wants to forget. Memories fade; Memorex lasts forever.
MaXXXine knowingly, lovingly possesses many of the same characteristics as Friday the 13th, with its fawning attention to the butchering of bodies, though done here with some actual skill. MaXXXine, though nasty and tasteless in a very American way, is perfused by the air of Italian horror, the variegated violence of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, with its ebony iconography of cryptic killers spilling scarlet blood. It is, in visual syntax and vocabulary, very giallo, effusive, the variations of violence bursting with giddiness.
Yet its debt to the attitude and infantile humor of the ’80s American horror flicks expunges it of any potential for emotional resonance. It's willfully immature, bereft of the ingenuity that made the films West is channeling special, like Bava's Bay of Blood, a progenitor of the slasher. The film is earnest in its Italian aesthetic affinity, and yet in its bones, MaXXXine remains American, like one of the minor slashers that adorned the rows in mom-and-pop video stores. In its interpretation of what defines a giallo, and what makes a giallo good, the film reflects West's natural instincts, and reveals his flaws. (De Palma did this better in Dressed to Kill, as did Verhoeven with Basic Instinct.) This is West’s most formally adroit work, in its lighting and editing, in the mise-en-scène of 2.35:1 compositions and use of Steadicam. And yet few images remain in the memory after the theater lights brighten. It's blandly stylish.
Despite the outrageous murders, MaXXXine is most satisfying in its early, intimate moments, where it’s more of a character study and semi-acerbic skewering of L.A. film culture. These constitute the most mature scenes West has done since The House of the Devil (still his best film). A scene near the beginning depicts Maxine auditioning for an ostensibly serious role (we soon find out that it's a horror sequel), and, after performing her part, is, of course, asked to show her breasts to the coterie of decision-makers sitting emotionlessly behind a table. West deftly uses the widescreen frame to reveal and conceal precisely, so we see Maxine's placid face as she lifts the top, then putting it back on without any explicit nudity. (Her naked scenes from the film-within-a-film in X are visible on a small TV.)
If there's a recurring theme in the trilogy it is the entitled craving for stardom. This is as true of Maxine as it was for Pearl. In that previous film this was repeated like a mantra (the film’s worst quality). Here, it’s even more cumbersome, juvenile for a talented filmmaker 20 years into his career. And at the end, after a twist that stuns with its inanity, this theme is reiterated as though a serious epiphany.
The film’s final burst of carnage is rushed, slovenly. West likes to shake you in the last 20 minutes of his movies, a catharsis-after-slow-burn tactic he used best in The House of the Devil. Here, he goes for a jarring tonal veer into ridiculous ’80s action, complete with the requisite deus ex machina appearance of the detectives, who seem to exist solely for this purpose, but uses a banal selection of shots of people shooting and being shot and cuts that betray the film's aesthetic idiosyncrasies. The climatic moment, meant to be revelatory, a turning point in Maxine's life, ends in a graphic, Maniac-style head explosion that surely made West squeal with delight. It's an awesome technical moment, but it lacks creativity and doesn't bore its way into your mind like the exploding heads in Dawn of the Dead, or Scanners, or even the uproarious Chopping Mall. (Earlier in the film, a guy gets his testicles stomped to goo in close-up, which does shock, not just for its ridiculous gore but the craftsmanship, the build-up, the unexpectedness.) West and Goth attempted a trilogy about loneliness, delusional and deceptive dreams, and the power of cinema, but there is no doubt about where West's heart lies: in retrograde violence for its own sake, in the chortles and gasps of midnight movie crowds, in admirative, emotionally stunted homage.