I have nothing against smart movies, but on the other hand, when a movie tries too hard to insert references that don’t quite work, it’s horrible.

Spoilers.

That can be done well. Just look at the Cornetto Trilogy by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Those reference both other movies and themselves quite a bit, but it’s done with taste and purpose. MaXXXine misses that mark.

But in order to explain my views on that, I’ll go back and talk about the previous two movies of the trilogy (although there has been talk of the series continuing, but the latest information on this is that Ti West is currently happy with the trilogy, so it’ll probably remain as such for the time being.

X came out in 2022 and it’s set in 1979. There’s a small film crew that goes out into the countryside to shoot a porn film in a small cabin they rented at a farm. After one of the crewmembers declines sex with their octogenarian hostess, the killing commences. Only Maxine, played by Mia Goth, survives and she takes their van to go to Hollywood, leaving the crime scene behind. We learn that she is actually the daughter of a preacher, who is still looking for her.

X is pure exploitation. Instead of horny teens going out camping or similar, the movie goes one step further and just has them do porn. An octogenarian couple as the villains is unusual, but at the same time this is exactly the kind of thing B-movies were sold on back in the day. No-one expected anything of quality and having a good trailer was enough to get enough people into the theaters to cover the minimal cost of the movie. I’m not saying X is not a quality movie as it certainly is, but it plays the part of a B-movie very well.

Pearl came out later in the same year. Again, Mia Goth stars, but now as Pearl, the octogenarian from the previous film, but in her youth during WWI as her husband is serving in the war. (Actually, Goth played that role in X as well.) Pearl is a young woman stuck with her strict mother and paralyzed father on a farm. The Spanish flu is also killing people all around the world, so they are isolating because of that as well (also, Pearl’s mother has a distinct German accent, which might be a bit of a problem during WWI. Pearl shows violent tendencies from the start, but when her attempt to leave this life by auditioning to get into a play falls apart, she takes it out on her parents and her best friend (of sorts) by massacring them.

Pearl is very different from X. While X is aesthetically very much of the 70s, Pearl has a look more reminiscent of early 30s first generation of color movies. I don’t know how well Pearl works on it’s own, as I assume most of the audience had seen X and understood what it is about. I do think it kind of requires that knowledge as otherwise it might be kind of boring, because it takes its time before it gets going.

So, MaXXXine came out two years later. Now Maxine from X has been working in the adult industry in LA for six years and is still trying to move into mainstream movies. At the same time Night Stalker is raging and seems to have a new twist as there is now pentagrams on the dead bodies. People around Maxine start to die, so the detectives on the case start to take an interest in her, all the while an unscrupulous private eye is hounding Maxine. Well, Maxine is anything but helpless, as we have already seen.

Maxine is a different kind of Final Girl. She is not the demure, eternally virginal girl. Besides the career in adult entertainment, we actually see her force her would-be murderer to strip naked before she crushes his balls early in the movie (although this incident has nothing to do with the main plot besides telling us how dangerous a place LA was around this time).

MaXXXine is not bad movie. It’s just kind of all over the place and it has the added problem I mentioned above. Let’s start with this snippet (which was also in the trailer):

Maxine Minx : Name 5 celebrities that got their start in horror movies.
Leon : Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta, Demi Moore, Brooke Shields…
Maxine Minx : Maxine Fuckin’ Minx.

There’s a big name missing from that: Kevin Bacon was in the original Friday the 13th. So, this is an in-joke, because Kevin Bacon has a role in the movie. So, they set this up just for this. It doesn’t really push the story forwards in the movie. (Also, was Demi Moore famous in 1985? I feel like her career was just starting at the time, but I’m not quite old enough to remember.)

Another similar one is early on, when Maxine drops her cigarette on the Theda Bara’s star on the Hollywood Walk or whatever it’s called. Theda Bara is an early movie star, who was kind of manufactured. She had a publicist who made up stories about her in order to sell her as an exotic, and thus interesting, actor with a mysterious past. So, you can argue that she has a link to Maxine, who has also built an image for herself, but in her case just to hide her past. Or is she shitting on Theda as she crushes the cigarette with her shoe.

However, Theda is also the name of the alligator in the pond near the farm where the first two movies (mostly) took place. So, I when I noticed the star, it wasn’t like I felt smart for remembering the name (which I only remembered because I had watched Pearl quite recently), but instead I tutted to myself because of the clumsiness of that moment.

Here’s a positive and smart way they were able to call back to the previous movies: The film starts with Pearl, as a young kid, rehearsing a dance routine while her father is behind the camera encouraging her. This is the same routine she uses in an audition in Pearl. You know, the kind of routine they would have in black and white movies (so there’s probably another Theda Bara link here).

However, this scene did kind of spoil the movie for me, although only by confirming my expectations. I had figured out that the killer in the third movie would be Maxine’s father from the last scenes of X where we learn that the preacher, who had been on TV in the house at all times, wa actually Maxine’s father, as I mentioned above.

That whole thing was just badly handled. I would understand all of this, if he was just some local preacher, who happened to have some kind of a program on a local network (assuming those kinds of networks existed in the US in the late 70s), but he appears to be very rich and thus has to be very famous. If so, why wasn’t Maxine using him as a springboard to fame, if fame was all she ever wanted? We have seen plenty of TV preachers use their family as part of their act. This would have been perfect for them both. Instead he is running a cult that is copycat killing peopel around Maxine the way Night Stalker did.

The whole thing would have worked better if he had lost his flock and was now desperately looking for Maxine in order to regain his former glory. Now the whole thing feels like a convoluted attempt to make some point about the nature of Hollywood (as the cult has big mansion just below the Hollywood sign) without actually committing to criticizing the movie industry. The whole cult also feels a bit too out there in context of the other two movies in the trilogy.

This isn’t even the only way the movie tries to make some kind of a point about Hollywood. We have Elizabeth Debicki as a director, who has just signed Maxine into her movie. Somehow this just happens very fast. They start filming within days of the audition. Sure, you could probably cast someone to star in your movie in Hollywood in days, but you might also want to give your production some time to get ready and your star a little more time to learn the role and the lines. There is also such a thing as rehearsals. One would assume Ti West would have enough confidence in his audience to see how stupid all that is.

Maxine’s agent is also just ready to kill someone for Maxine in a very horrific way and dispose of the body. Is that supposed to be a comment on the cutthroat nature of the business? The risks involved can’t really be worth it for an actor in the adult business who is just moving into low budget horror movies.

Finally, why is Maxine so fucking stupid? I mean, she isn’t, but at the same time it takes her days to figure out something everyone else knew from the very beginning. Two of her friends turn out dead after both of them asked whether she would join them at a party in the hills. Somehow Maxine just doesn’t register this information until the end of the movie. That is just extremaly bad writing.

In some ways there is still life in the character of Maxine, but if this movie is an indication of where this franchise is going, I’m fine, thanks.