The story of X and Pearl, the twin 2022 hits from director Ti West, has already become enshrined in horror fan lore. While sequestered in quarantine before shooting the first film in early 2021, West and star Mia Goth conceived and wrote the second, and convinced studio A24 to extend the production to shoot two films for the price of one. The existence of Pearl was kept entirely under wraps, and was only announced via a surprise trailer at the end of X’s credits. The two films are about as different as two horror movies in the same series can be– X is a gleefully raunchy throwback to ‘70s grindhouse exploitation, Pearl a southern gothic melodrama styled after the technicolor MGM musicals of the 1940s– but the dialogue between them is so potent that it’s difficult to imagine one without the other. In this age of cinematic universes and megafranchises, there’s something refreshing about this seemingly accidental series: by allowing his ideas to grow organically, West has created a series more cohesive than anything the house of Marvel could chart out.

Now, two years later, this diptych has become a trilogy with the release of MaXXXine. Unlike Pearl, which whisked us back to the 1910s, MaXXXine follows X’s porn-star final girl forward into the ‘80s. The result, while arguably the least essential of the three films, is nevertheless wildly entertaining, and about as much fun as a horror movie can be in 2024.

Following the events of X, Goth’s Maxine Minx has made her way from Texas to Hollywood; she’s still making appearances in stag reels and private peep shows, but she’s eying a transition into the legitimate movie stardom she considers her destiny. A break comes, more or less, in The Puritan 2, a video-nasty sequel helmed by imperious director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki). But as Maxine claws her way to the top, a number of her working-girl friends start turning up dead, and she begins to fear her past might be catching up with her.

The tricky thing about reviewing any sequel is the need to judge it both on its own terms and as a follow up to the films which came before. The biggest problem with MaXXXine is that it follows Pearl, a prequel so wildly unconventional– and so unexpectedly and earnestly good– that, by returning to the grindhouse mold of X, it can’t help but feel like a step backwards, a disappointing zig compared to Pearl’s daring zag. MaXXXine is also tasked with balancing the gnarly, over-the-top thrills of X with the surprising pathos of Pearl, which is not always a tenable combination. Some kills, which are clearly intended as gruesome fun, come off as a bit mean-spirited in light of the added emphasis on character development; conversely, Maxine’s trauma is illustrated with flashbacks to scenes from X which were simply never meant to shoulder such weight, and the effect is often downright silly. Even in a series as fundamentally makeshift as this one, MaXXXine is a strange and tonally curious trilogy capper.

All of this is true– and yet, I can’t deny that I had a big, ghoulish grin on my face for almost all of MaXXXine’s running time. Like X before it, MaXXXine is wild, lurid, and just smart enough to rise above the (admittedly often very bad) “video nasties” to which it pays homage. West deploys a wide variety of genre signifiers; the killer, identified by their black leather gloves and hunting knife, is pure giallo, and one set piece on the Universal backlot takes place at the original Bates Motel (or at least an original Bates Motel– “They shot a sequel here, can you believe it?” Decker sniffs). The supporting cast, which includes Giancarlo Esposito in a ridiculous hairpiece, pop singers Moses Sumney and Halsey, and Kevin Bacon, are all clearly having the time of their lives (Bacon in particular is a delight as an oily Louisianan detective who retains his smarminess even as he eats complete shit in almost every scene). In a cinematic landscape in which horror has become increasingly dour and self-serious, it’s refreshing to have a series which is both well-made and bloody good fun.

This is not to say that there’s nothing going on under the hood. Like its predecessors, MaXXXine’s orgy of sex and violence is framed around the pursuit of fame. Maxine wants to be a star, of course, but so does everyone else in Los Angeles; even LAPD detective Bobby Canavale reveals his bad-cop swagger to be a remnant of a failed acting career. Maxine and her fellow sex workers jockey for space on Sunset Strip with would-be actors dressed as icons from Hollywood’s past (in one particularly memorable sequence, Maxine is menaced by an itinerant Buster Keaton impersonator). They also live in fear of the real-life “Night Stalker” serial killer Richard Ramirez, but even then most of them accept that danger as a small price for fame; “No one would remember Elizabeth Short if it weren’t for the Black Dahlia,” Halsey shrugs.*

Indeed, the film opens with a montage of news clips about the Night Stalker killings, along with some obligatory clips of Reagan and other ‘80s signifiers. I don’t think it should count as a spoiler to reveal that the killer here is not actually Ramirez (this isn’t a Ryan Murphy production), but one clip does stand out: Tipper Gore, describing in horror the contents of Prince’s “Darling Nikki” at the Parents Music Resource Center hearings, followed by a rebuttal from Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider. This is, after all, what was really going on during the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80. All those cults of Satanists supposedly sacrificing children across the country were merely strawmen constructed by the powers that were as an excuse to implement regressive conservative doctrine. It’s the exact same tactic currently being used to stifle LGBTQ and other marginalized people today– which is what makes Maxine Minx such an indelible protagonist for this particular moment. As an unapologetic porn star in Reagan’s America, Maxine stands in opposition to these forces, making her tooth-and-nail ascent all the more satisfying.

It is this deftness at weaving together past and present while still serving up good, pulpy fun which is the X series’ greatest asset (consider that Pearl, of all films, was the first to draw direct parallels between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19 pandemics). MaXXXine is being billed as the final film in a trilogy, but that sort of designation rarely means much in the world of horror (1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter doesn’t even fall at the series’ halfway point). I personally see no reason why West and Goth couldn’t continue the series indefinitely, with Pearl and Maxine aging in real time across the twentieth century like a pair of grand guignol Antoine Doinels. 

MaXXXine is, pound for pound, probably the least of the X trilogy so far, neither as gleefully transgressive as the first film nor as unexpectedly poignant as the second. But it remains the sort of goopy, grisly fun we simply don’t get enough of these days– at least not in mainstream theaters, and certainly not as lovingly made. Like its predecessors, MaXXXine offers a slyly subversive take on the present as seen through the past– and it cements both its main character and its lead actress as an unequivocal staaaawwwwrrrrr.

* – An aside for local interest: though the Black Dahlia murder was a quintessentially Los Angeles crime, Elizabeth Short was born in Hyde Park and raised in Medford. Bostonian death-trippers who are so inclined can pay their respects at a memorial near the site of her childhood home, just off the 101 bus route.

MaXXXine
2024
dir. Ti West
103 min.

Opens Friday, 7/5 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, and theaters everywhere.