Mia Goth returns to role of the monstrously troubled young woman who won’t let life stand in her way
Maxxxine
Starring Mia Goth, Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Debicki, Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan
Directed by Ti West
Rated R
In theaters Friday, July 5
In the third film of director Ti West’s cult-favorite slasher-flick franchise, young Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) has set her sights on Hollywood stardom. But her violent past comes back to haunt her, as the only survivor of a horrific massacre when she was younger with some truly effed-up layers of deep trauma passed along from her sex-obsessed grandmother.
At the screening I attended, I saw dozens of young women dressed like Goth’s character from previous films, in overalls, boots and bandanas, or blood-red 1900s dresses. One told me she loves these movies because Maxxxine has become an emblem of female empowerment, a young woman with life stacked against her who won’t let that stop her. Even if that means using an axe, a shotgun or a junkyard car-crusher to get there.
In Maxxxine, it’s now the mid-1980s and Goth’s character has added a couple of x’s to her name to reflect her success as a porn actress. But she wants more, to become famous as a mainstream star. A serial killer, murdering young women, is stalking Hollywood, and Maxxxine’s friends and coworkers are turning up dead and maimed. When she gets her big break, with a role in a non-porn horror movie, the icy female director (Elizabeth Debicki, below)warns Maxxxine to focus on her career, and to quash anything that might stand in her way. And you know she will.
Returning director Ti West has again created a super-stylized window into Maxxxine’s smeary world, swirling with grungy ‘80s esthetic and music. (In the opening scene, she struts out from an audition to ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’.”) It’s a meta-movie, a horror flick that stylistically recalls other horror flicks of its era. There’s over-the-top gore, extreme violence and intentionally campy dialogue. And like the previous films, it explores the seedy underbelly where promiscuous sex, pornography, hyper violence and religious extremism root around in the same grimy bed. Add some Hollywood dream-machine toxicity, and voila, you’ve got Maxxxine.
But it feels like more of a loose gorehound grab bag than a firmed-up story, with stabs of dark humor, lurid sights and grindhouse grit meant as a horror-movie homage to “exploitative” flicks from an earlier era. You know, exploding heads, mangled bodies and slashing knives. And suitcases full of severed body parts.
Kevin Bacon has a hammy ball as a slimy private “dick,” an investigator hired to trail Maxxxine. Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan are L.A. homicide cops trying to sniff out the killer terrorizing Tinseltown. Giancarlo Esposito, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is her slick fixer of a manager. Lily Collins plays an ill-fated horror-movie costar. And there’s Sophie Tucker, from TV’s Yellowjackets, and the singer Halsey, who plays a short-lived porno pal.
But everybody and everything revolves around Maxxxine. And model-turned-actress Mia Goth is once again riveting as the young woman at the messy, macabre center, fighting “the devil” inside her as she charges into the fame she always wanted, grabbing for the life she insists she deserves.
Maybe her deeply troubled path left Maxxxine starving for attention while fating her for heinous acts of vengeful retribution. The movie opens with a quote from the late, great Hollywood diva Bette Davis, about how “until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.” Maxxxine is indeed a movie-star monster in stiletto heels, stabbing now into the dark heart of Hollywood, drawing new blood—and appeasing legions of fans who see her as more victim of circumstance than villain.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 