‘MaXXXine’ Brings Back Old-School Porn and Horror, 1980s Style

She lived through what newspapers dubbed “The Texas Porn Star Massacre,” a long, dark, Type O-splattered night of the soul that left her fellow purveyors of quality adult entertainment outlined in chalk. Now Maxine Miller — better known by her stage name Maxine Minx — must endure an environment so horrific, so murderous that her chances of survival are likely less than zero: the world of big-time Hollywood moviemaking. MaXXXine is a lot of things: a tribute to ’80s slasher flicks, an affectionate recreation (and reclamation) of vintage sleaze, the end of a major 21st century horror trilogy and a further testament to the screen duo of director Ti West and star Mia Goth. But it’s also a sideways swipe at the fact that the Dream Factory has always been a real-life nightmare for so many of the hopefuls clawing their way to the top, and a wink-nudge reminder that the carnage it creates for consumers is nothing compared to the true-crime atrocities happening outside the studio gates. Los Angeles eats itself, and its back alleys are littered with spit-out bones.

Sorry, we’re making this sound like a chin-stroking thesis project. You’re still watching a movie that takes perverse glee in seeing a potential rapist get his testicles stomped in loving, gruesome close-up. The third collaboration between the good people who brought you the ’70s grindhouse ode X and the singularly disturbing, brilliant Pearl (both 2022), MaXXXine wallows in yesteryear’s hair-teased Tinseltown sordidness with the intense dedication of a Civil War re-enactment. It may be the weakest entry of the three, but that fact says less about the quality of this particular fetishization and more about the high bar that West & Goth set with their previous chapters. Having transposed their return-of-the-repressed fixations onto the Reagan era, the director and star continue to connect the dots between sex and violence, porn and horror, public pearl-clutching and private predatory behavior. There is no bloody business like show business.

As for the Marvelous Ms. Minx, she’s “recovered” (kindly note the scare quotes) from that Lone Star nightmare way back when and has established herself as a next-gen Seka in the triple-X world. Now, she’s ready to conquer the world of mainstream moviemaking. Luckily for her, a potential crossover lurks on the horizon, in the form of a lead role in The Puritan II, a sequel to a big-time slasher. When Maxine goes to read for the producers, she turns an exploitation-flick monologue into something like a Shakespearean soliloquy. Excellent job, she’s told. Now please take your top off. The casual manner in which our hero loses her top, but not her cool suggests that she’s well aware of how the game is played. The porn world is just more transparent about it.

The director, Elizabeth Bender (The Crown‘s Elizabeth Debicki), sees something in Maxine’s ambition — not to mention her IRL backstory — that intrigues her. She gets the part. Right around this time, however, a mysterious video tape shows up on Maxine’s doorstep. It features news reports of that horrible slaughter back in Texas. But there are also old home movies of Maxine doing a soft-shoe routine as a girl, while her preacher father praises his daughter offscreen and makes her recite the American Success Story mantra: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” Maybe this unsolicited blast from her past has something to do with the skeezy gumshoe who’s been lurking around; he’s played by Kevin Bacon in maximum creepazoid mode, coincidentally making this the second movie of the week to intertwine his facility with skin-crawling bad guys and ’80s infatuations. Or maybe it’s connected to the fact that somebody sporting some giallo-style black gloves has been stalking Maxine. Meanwhile, a lot of her friends and former costars have started turning up dead….

There are any number of possible suspects behind this targeted campaign of murder, ranging from the private dick to the director herself to Minx’s agent (Giancarlo Esposito). News reports conspicuously mention a serial killer dubbed “the Night Stalker” who’s been terrorizing Los Angeles. Even the two cops (Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan) investigating the string of homicides aren’t above suspicion. West is naturally less interested in whodunnit than how-gory-did-they-make it, staging gruesome, old-school kills with a professional’s eye and a lifetime Fangoria subscriber’s giddiness.

He’s also far more intent on giving his muse another meticulously production-staged stage on which to rage, and as with X and Pearl, Goth once again proves that there’s no better actor gracing genre films at the moment. What she brings to this retro-splatterfest can’t be understated; the star has a way of suggesting steeliness is both a defense mechanism and a hard-won privilege for Maxine, as well as giving you peeks of PTSD beneath the Teflon smile and Aquanetted ‘do. While there’s nothing on the level of Pearl‘s climactic monologue or credit-roll close-up, Goth still turns this revenge-of-the-final-girl parable into superior flashback pulp. West is more than willing to simply be the Von Sternberg to her slasher-flick Dietrich. If he can spill literal gallons of stage blood, drop Satanic Panic references and pay homage to Body Double via a Frankie Goes to Hollywood needle drop, that’s just Caro-syrup frosting on the cake.

That MaXXXine ends with hellfire and brimstone under a certain iconic sign in Hell-Ay is not just unsurprising but inevitable — this is a movie that lives on meta-digs at the traditional epicenter of the movie industry, throwing in signifiers like Theda Bara walk-of-fame star and the Bates Motel set for good measure. Every street in Hollywood has its own history and its own horror story, and while that’s not exactly an original sentiment, West & Goth know how to make that warhorse lament shriek as well as sing. We meet Minx as a nobody and leave her as a star, washed of her sins via the salvation of horror movies. That’s certainly love letter material, but the fact that its written in deep-red ink is not accidental.