Maxxxine

 It begins, of course, with barn doors opening. Only this time they don't belong to a barn, but to a giant studio soundstage. In struts Maxine Minx, porn starlet, determined to cross over and become the biggest goddamn star in Hollywood. And the film... it just struts right along with her and doesn't ease up until the credits are well past done.

 She's there to audition for the sequel to a controversial horror movie. And, in the course of a beautifully filmed one-shot, she proceeds to (as she brashly puts it to the rest of the hopefuls lining outside the casting call) fucking nail it. Her transformation is astounding, calculated to floor us as much as the directors and producers casting her. It's a bravura sequence that's quickly, pointedly deflated by one of the producers asking to see Maxine's breasts; To which she quickly complies, of course. She's a pro.

 Maxxine is the capper to a slasher-adjacent trilogy writer/director Ti West started with X and Pearl - all shot mostly with the same crew and all starring the ridiculously talented Mia Goth. All you need to know from them, really, is that Maxine was the only survivor - the final girl - from the massacre of a whole porn crew on the remote Texas farm they had chosen as a set.

 You should watch them anyways. Not just because they'll let you appreciate shared themes and motifs (the opening barn doors, for example, how Maxine's casting references the monologue in Pearl, or the differing mottoes that inform their characters' worldviews), but because they are both incredible.

 Both prior movies were slasher movies cross-pollinated with clever, extremely dry humour. While X is knowingly a fairly formulaic horror film, Pearl is a much more complicated beast: a character study wearing the skin of a technicolour melodrama with some gruesome killings sprinkled in and a wicked sense of black humour.

 Maxxxine takes its queues, narrative and stylistic, from trashy '80s culture - Satanic panic, Brian DePalma and Angel. And also Giallo - a whole lot of it, from the lurid colours and the way stabbings are shot to the fetishistical focus on the killer's very expressive thick leather gloves, complete with squeaky leather sounds.

 After the events of X, Maxine's moved to LA and worked diligently to move on up in the world. Aware that her porn star career has a sell by date and that she's rapidly approaching it, she's been doggedly pursuing crossover success. Just when it looks like she's made it, a sleazy creep of a private investigator (Kevin Bacon, beautifully milking the role for all it's worth) turns up and tries to coerce her into meeting his employer for some nefarious end.

 The film is set during the couple of years that the Night Stalker was killing women in the area, too, giving the film a nasty sense of background menace - one that's quickly realized once Maxine's friends and coworkers start popping up dead.

 Calling it horror might be a bit of a stretch, but it's a highly entertaining, grisly thriller with a Fangoria gorehound sensibility: Heads will explode, balls will be (graphically) busted, and body parts will tumble down a stairwell with artistic abandon.
 The mystery itself is ridiculous in not entirely satisfying ways. It works well driving the rising suspense, but when all is revealed, while funny, it's a little too over the top and on-the-nose, like an off-hand joke that somehow became a plot point. And the film as a whole is let down by a weak ending that sets up a righteous third act bloodbath and then messes up the action, both conceptually and stylistically.

 It somewhat threatens to overshadow the rest of the film, which is a shame, because other than that relatively minor stumble, it's a stunningly realized creation. It looks incredible - cinematographer Eliot Rockett and colorist Tom Poole faithfully recreate the grimy, grainy look of celluloid on digital, and West's muscular yet detailed directing style mirrors how driven Maxine herself is. The prologue and title sequences alone are worth the price of admission.

 The acting is excellent; Not just from Goth and Bacon, but from a whole ensemble of memorable characters: Elizabeth Debicki as a hardass director, Giancarlo Esposito as an agent who's absolutely not above getting his hands dirty, and Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale liven things up considerably as a pair of homicide detectives.

 Beyond that there's a whole lot of filmic references that, honestly, don't seem to come to much; Is there any point in making a rapist look like Buster Keaton, other than to lump him in with the other celebrity impersonators on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? The same goes for a chase down the Universal backlot that ends in the Bates Motel, which looms big in the film as a whole but never seems to really stand in for anything but Maxine's aspirations (it's pretty funny when the director makes sure to mention Psycho II was shot there a couple years earlier, though).

 Still: Maxxine may hit a few minor bum notes, come off as a little hollow, but it's still a gorgeous-looking film that's a huge amount of fun. It doesn't stand at the same level as the other two movies in the trilogy, but even if it ultimately misses the mark it's still an ambitious, well-crafted movie bursting with memorable scenes and the subversive sense of humour that lines all of these films.