2024-07-13 21:06:47
Among the most popular midnight films of this year’s Karlovy Vary festival was the American horror film MaXXXine, which was brought by director Ti West himself. A week later, his new film, which is a bloody tribute to Hollywood of the 80s of the last century, is released in regular cinema distribution.
A stylish ride through sun-drenched Los Angeles, where a serial killer is on the rampage, shows that the movie industry can be as much a monster as a leather-gloved killer.
Forty-three-year-old American screenwriter and director Ti West originally wanted to make just one film, a quirky variation on the horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he called X. In it, a group of filmmakers arrives in rural Texas in 1979, renting a cottage to make a cheap but ambitious porn. But a couple of old men living nearby have completely different intentions with the participants.
The film cleverly played with elements of 1970s horror films falling into the slasher subgenre, using thoughtful shots to explore the similarities and differences between the two areas most associated with voyeurism: horror and pornography. He also broke down the clichés associated with these genres.
But Ti West started shooting his X during the pandemic and suddenly there was an opportunity to use the same backdrops for the next film Pearl, which predates the first one by many decades and plays for a change with the procedures of period melodramas or classic Hollywood. Both films were released in 2022. The current MaXXXine completes the loose trilogy. And although the plot directly follows on from X, just like the previous parts, it stands as an independent, stylistically very different work.
The heroine and the only survivor of the massacre, Maxine, played by the enchanting Mia Goth, is already an established porn actress, but she is looking for opportunities to break through further. At the beginning, the video shows her in her childhood, when her father encourages her not to be afraid to do anything to fulfill her ambitions. Already in the present, the predatory, self-confident, albeit at the same time traumatized by terrible experiences, protagonist invades the casting of the fictional horror Puritánka 2, determined to seize the leading role for herself. Her riveting monologue in front of the camera shows that her confidence has a solid foundation in her acting skills.
Mia Goth plays Maxine, who aspires to become an acting star. | Photo: CinemArt
But just as her new career is about to take off, Maxine’s past begins to catch up. Footage is emerging of what happened six years ago at a cabin somewhere in Texas. A slimy private detective played by Kevin Bacon suggests to the heroine not to mess with his dangerous employer. And people around her are starting to die because of it.
However, Maxine refuses to be the classic 80s horror heroine. He intends to have his destiny firmly in his own hands.
Ti West once again created a fun pastiche. With long shots, it will remind you of the period thrillers of Brian de Palma, as well as the Italian horror films of filmmakers like Lucio Fulci, competing in the most sophisticated ways to dispose of victims.
Cast by familiar faces, the film, which also features Giancarlo Esposito, singer Halsey or actresses Elizabeth Debicki and Lily Collins, takes place right in Hollywood. Therefore, it creates the impression that the central actress is moving not in reality, but in a landscape woven directly from the movies. Ti West, however, unlike Brian De Palma and others he refers to, relies more on black humor or exaggeration. He doesn’t just pay homage to Hollywood, he also criticizes it.
Once again we find ourselves on the set of a film, instead of porn it’s a horror film and the idea that an undervalued or wasteful genre can be a platform for innovation and creative thinking is explored again. Which is by no means an original idea, this type of images has always served as a grateful space for various technological, narrative or aesthetic experiments.
Giancarlo Esposito as Teddy and Mia Goth as Maxine. | Photo: CinemArt
MaXXXine, on the other hand, makes a little mockery of these ambitions – including her own. At its core, it remains a fun B-movie that offers various subversive lines, but ultimately lovingly embraces its scrappy nature.
Brian de Palma already “described” a lot from the father of the thriller genre, Alfred Hitchcock. Ti West also winks at him as in X, but more with the aim of showing how far he deviates from those roots.
One scene takes place right in the famous Bates Motel from Hitchcock’s Psycho, which still stands in the middle of Hollywood Studios. However, West makes it clear that he came to these scenes primarily to play casually.
MaXXXine is by no means an original show. The actors are frolicking on the set, the bands ZZ Top or Frankie Goes to Hollywood are playing, and everything here is just as burnt out as in the movies and music of the 80s.
When West wants to thematize gender stereotypes and the unhealthiness of Hollywood and excessive ambition, he is not as convincing as he would probably like. And MaXXXine has neither the tension nor the pace of period thrillers, it is too drunk on style and the fact that everything is a bit of an homage, quote or variation.
It works as a black horror-comedy, although this trip through the contours of contemporary Los Angeles is more of a fun canape than a major contribution to horror history.
Film
MaXXXine
Written and directed by Ti West
CinemArt, Czech premiere on July 11.