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‘Maxxxine’ Review: Mia Goth Fights the Hollywood Power in Ti West’s Retro- ’80s Schlock Sex-and-Horror Thriller. It’s Fun at Times, but It’s No ‘Pearl’
Mia Goth fights the Hollywood power in the third chapter of Ti West's horror franchise, which reconfigures tawdry '80s thrillers, but maybe not enough.
“X,” the first movie in Ti West ’s grungy but elevated artisanal-trash horror franchise (it’s been billed as a trilogy but may yet produce further installments), was an unusually effective stab at recreating the ’70s farmhouse-turned-charnel-house vibe of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” spiced with the fleshpot voyeurism of ’70s porn. Porn stars, at the time, had little to no chance of breaking into mainstream movies, an idea that was at least flirted with when Brian De Palma considered casting the triple-X superstar Annette Haven in “Body Double” (the studio said: over our dead stock portfolio). But just as Tarantino can draw on the lowest of grindhouse muck, West, in “Maxxxine,” applies his genre-movie scholasticism to a form that seems, on the face of it, to be the definition of disreputable: the ’80s sexploitation thriller — the kind of badly lit product, featuring women in heavy-metal lingerie and psycho stalkers who are like leering stand-ins for the men in the audience, that no one ever pretended was any good.
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