Tinseltown, 1985. Maxine Minx is a porn star who wants to be a legit movie actor, but this is a horror movie by the schlocky Ti West, so you ought to adjust your expectations accordingly. West – swapping mediums and using scratchy VHS to match the film’s period, as well as splashy cuts and Brian De Palma split-screens – leans heavily into the 80s setting. As an opening montage informs us, this is the era of the video nasty, evangelical boycotts of pornography, and a serial killer known as the Night Stalker haunting the streets of the city: Maxine (Mia Goth) is in a pressure cooker.
MaXXXine is the splashy third instalment in Ti West’s loose trilogy of self-conscious period-set horror flicks, following on from his slasher movies X and Pearl. It’s also the weakest of the three. Each film shares a lead actress – the alien-eyed, strange, baby-voiced powerhouse that is Mia Goth – and themes around stardom, sex, fame, violence, and the act of filmmaking. Each are glossy pastiches of movie history, which makes them both great fun and not particularly deep.
Here, Maxine is a self-invented star of the early home video porno craze, working out of Los Angeles after discarding a traumatic past back in the heartland. (We soon realise she is the previous protagonist of X, who was the sole survivor of a homicidal rampage). She gets a supporting role working for a tough female director (Elizabeth Debicki, chewing the scenery with pretentious monologuing – all of West’s dialogue clangs). Meanwhile, Maxine learns from a local private eye (Kevin Bacon, giving a loud, garrulous performance that takes up all the air in the room) that a mysterious and powerful figure seems to be after her, warning that her bloody history is coming back to haunt her.
People close to her start to turn up dead. The plot makes less and less sense as the film progresses, throwing itself into movie references from Suspiria to Chinatown instead of focusing on its own story; the motivations of its characters, on a most basic level, leave you scratching your head. (Why would a local private eye be incited to work on behalf of a psychopath? How come nobody recognised that this famous porn star was the same one to whom the events of X happened? Why is Maxine’s agent also cheerfully homicidal at the drop of a hat, even if he is played by Giancarlo Esposito?)
But what Ti West lacks in sense and script he makes up for in style – and copious gore. And Mia Goth, with her blue jeans and feathered hair, is a tiny, vicious dynamo, both sexy and ruthless: we know what she’s capable of doing to survive. She puts a stiletto through a would-be attacker’s testicle before the film even gets into gear.
It’s a shame, then, that it isn’t enough to prop up this flimsy Hollywood fable. It has nothing new to say about fame, or celebrity, or violence, or sex. It’s just clangingly on-the-nose dialogue, some serviceably gross stabbing and squelching, and an overblown finale under the Hollywood sign (yes, really). If MaXXXine stopped basking in its own self-congratulatory cleverness for a moment, it might have had a decent film in there somewhere. Alas, this is not it.
‘MaXXXine’ is in cinemas on 5 July