MaXXXine

There’s an audacity to writer/director/editor Ti West’s horror triptych that began with Seventies rural slasher X, then skipped back to 1918 for prequel Pearl, and now leaps back to the future with MaXXXine. Part of that boldness is that he could only bring their themes of sex, cinema, and violence to full fruition when the trilogy is complete. Because, just as Pearl’s unmasking of aged killer Pearl (Goth) had its symmetry with the story of X’s final girl, Maxine Minx (Goth again), now MaXXXine arrives in 1985.

Timing is one of the elements that ties the trilogy together. Six years (and one bloodbath) after X’s aspiring movie mogul waxed poetic about video giving the means of production to the masses, that future has come to pass. Maxine is now a star – but only to the leering middle-aged men that ogle the pornos she’s pumping out in the Hollywood Hills. She wants real fame – to follow Marilyn Chambers and Brigitte Lahaie into horror flicks, and from there into mainstream celebrity, the only thing that matters to her.

Maxine’s passion and flair for reinvention is core to the film series, but that old saying about the past not being done with us comes down hard on her. All the components set up in X – the footage and bodies left on the farm, the televangelist raging about sex and sin, the multiples lives that Maxine has left behind – all come hurtling back in the gold-toothed grin of private investigator John Labat (a delightfully sleazy Bacon), and the leather-gloved hands of an unseen killer, targeting everyone in Maxine’s life.

On the surface, MaXXXine is set up as a modern addition to the febrile, salacious, post-Dressed to Kill slashers of the Eighties, where sleaze and psychopathy smash into each other on the Sunset Strip. While West is a modern master of gore, dealing out some of the most creative and gruesome onscreen mutilations in recent years, he’s got more on his mind than just tits and ass and entrails. The Maxine he and Goth established in X is no shrinking violet: Instead, she is committed to her oft-repeated mantra that she will not accept a life she does not deserve. But who decides what she deserves?

In reviving the era of neon and denim, Satanic Panics and PMRC stickers, West’s re-created Hollywood is as impressive a feat of onscreen reconstructive archaeology as Quentin Tarantino pulled off for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Indeed, while MaXXXine wraps up the X trilogy, its insight into the horrifying allure of Tinseltown would make for a fascinating triple bill with Tarantino’s fairy tale and Damien Chazelle’s crash-and-burn masterpiece Babylon. The silver screen dream is dead, West seems to say, and the only survivors are those prepared to cross lines and bust taboos – and even then, the rewards may be slender. Maxine’s desire to star in a sequel to a movie that even her Fangoria-reading best friend, Leon (Sumney, excelling as a skate punk video store nerd) can only call underrated puts her in the orbit of director Elizabeth Bender (Debicki, coldly sardonic), whose own definition of success seems like a warning.

Headlining it all is another remarkable performance from Goth. It’s hard to imagine this series working with anyone else in the lead role(s), and this older Maxine is hardened in ways that none of her Eighties final girl precursors ever were. If you’ve been paying the slightest attention to the earlier films, there’s no doubt how this will all play out. The pleasures are in watching Maxine navigate through the bloodshed to the denouement she deserves, and watching West cut into the seductive allure of cinema.