'MaXXXine' is all style, not enough substance

The third film in director Ti West's trilogy successfully recreates the sleazy side of 1980s Hollywood, but the plot is less than intriguing.

Ti West’s 2022 film X, the story of a 1970s Texas porn shoot-turned-massacre, already inspired a prequel, Pearl, that arrived just a few months later. 

Now, West has completed the slasher trilogy with a sequel, MaXXXine, which brings the Maxine character (Mia Goth) into 1980s Hollywood, when she’s trying to segue from porn into work as an actress in horror B movies. 

Set in 1985, against the backdrop of the Night Stalker killings, the film is impressive from a stylistic perspective. Hinting at the work of everyone from DePalma to Argento, it mostly convincingly recreates the look of Hollywood circa that period (or, at least, a version where the Hollywood sign is much smaller than the real one- and the less said about the film’s visit to the old Bates Motel set, the better.) 

However, the plot, which revolves around a murder mystery, isn’t particularly interesting most of the time and gets even sillier once it’s solved. 

As MaXXXine begins, Maxine Minx, who spent the first movie walking around in overalls but no shirt, has left behind the massacre in Texas to join the more mainstream adult film industry in Los Angeles, a career she must supplement with work in the sort of “nudie booths” that Randal was talking about in Clerks.

Maxine’s real dream is mainstream Hollywood stardom, and she lands a role in a horror film directed by a British girlboss type (Elizabeth Debecki). It’s a career path, from porn stardom to mainstream stardom, that’s been attempted quite a few times but never quite happens, but what is Hollywood about besides irrational dreams?

However, a mysterious figure who knows all about Maxine’s sordid past is sending threatening videotapes and offing her friends one by one. 

The mystery killer is represented by a private investigator, and Kevin Bacon plays that P.I. in full sleaze mode, bringing back his old "you're not a bad-looking man, Mr. Garrison” accent to play a guy from New Orleans. It’s my favorite Bacon performance in years even before his humorous exit; he plays a more generic villain character this week in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. 

The cast is rounded out by the musician Moses Sumney (as a gay video store pal of Maxine’s), Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan (as murder investigators) and Emily in Paris’ Lilly Collins, as a movie costar.

Also, as a Hollywood agent sporting one of the most comical hairpieces I’ve ever seen, Giancarlo Esposito gets to have a ton of fun. Knowing West’s affinity for such things, I’d love to see a spinoff about the backstory of either of those characters. 

The film is much fun as long as the story isn’t at the center. The part about the Night Stalker murders never really fits organically into this movie’s plot, the way the Manson murders did in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The denouement ends up as another riff on the Satanic Panic, which has been done to death in recent years, especially in the horror genre. 

The actual ending is especially silly, and it’s also a rare movie in which someone does a huge amount of cocaine, but it doesn’t act as a harbinger of their doom.