Maxxine is the culmination of a weird little trilogy made by Ti West and starring Mia Goth, one which we’re missing a catchy name for but which regardless consists of X, Pearl and now this. If I’m completely honest, neither of the first two films properly clicked for me like they did for others. I knew people who argued that X was some kind of subversive genius but I found it at its most satisfying when eschewing subversion for gory kills. Pearl I found even more hard work, a formless piece that hinges entirely on the threat of something cool happening and then also Mia Goth’s performance. Both I enjoyed overall but neither felt special. I expected the same from Maxxxine. I got something much more interesting, by which I mean worse.

The story here follows on directly from X, with Maxine working in the adult film industry in LA and auditioning for horror films. She gets a big part in an exciting horror sequel and we follow her getting ready for that. A series of murders is happening at the same time, targeting those around Maxine, all in the shadow of this satanic panic stuff that actually was a big thing in the eighties. Into that realm is also thrown a private detective who is chasing down Maxine and putting pressure on her about the events at the farm in X. The thing is, the plot does feel like the way I’m describing it, disparate strands just floating around until eventually there’s a big sloppy mess at the end. I could forgive the plot being a bit of a mess for a while as it was just a vehicle for set pieces, but once the end slaps us in the face with narrative, you can’t help but feel insulted.

[Kevin Bacon is] channelling Foghorn Leghorn by way of Jake Gittes from Chinatown if he was the human villain in a Muppet movie.

A big sloppy mess of plots requires a big sloppy mess of casts, all of whom seem to be from different films. We have the ever elegant Elizabeth Debicki playing a tough but fair director, Lily Collins showing a misunderstanding of the Yorkshire accent that is usually only reserved for Americans and Michele Monaghan getting to play a hard boiled cop for her two scenes. Two rise above the crop though. Naturally, having been in all three of these now, Mia Goth is getting pretty good at this thing. She has a wonderfully cinematic face, full of weird angles that you can’t look away from and given absolutely nothing, she is able to spin something. My favourite performance though, for some reason, is Kevin Bacon. He gets to play the private investigator, channelling Foghorn Leghorn by way of Jake Gittes from Chinatown if he was the human villain in a Muppet movie. I don’t understand what he’s doing or why, but when he crawls into a scene, his stench of corruption briefly turning the film into a 4D experience, I sat up. In this big confusing gumbo of a film, Bacon is a gift.

And now we get into my real beef with Maxxxine. The film, to its genuine credit, looks and sounds amazing. All of the people who worked on the production, visual effects and sound work for the film have knocked it out the park recreating the scuzzy feel of the world. Obviously, I didn’t spend a lot of time in LA during the eighties due to reasons involving my birth and lack thereof, but the important thing is that it feels authentic. It reminds me of other films made in that time, drenched in the stench of the time, like a good and nasty Brian De Palma film. Unfortunately, this is the root of the issue. Maxxxine is not a Brian De Palma film but it really believes it is.

[Maxxxine] will satisfy those who are vaguely familiar with the films of the time but if you’ve seen even one De Palma film […] you’re going to find the film empty.

For those who haven’t trawled the dusty shelves of eighties erotic thrillers, Brian De Palma is the mind behind such trash as Dressed to Kill, Phantom of the Paradise and most importantly for this review, Body Double. His films are full of nudity, violence and a general feeling that you wouldn’t want to watch this with your mother. I know for a fact that Ti West is trying to make a De Palma film because of how much he cribs from Body Double, whether it’s the focus on Hollywood, the gloved killer (which De Palma himself took from giallo films) or most egregious of all, a sequence soundtracked by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. West plays “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” over a disco scene in a move that pales when compared to the excessive brilliance of De Palma taking five minutes out of Body Double to walk onto the music video of “Relax.” It’s the kind of pointless yet intoxicating move that even a lower budget film like Maxxxine would get test-screened out of it, and it’s also the kind of thing that means we still talk about Body Double decades later. Maxxxine has no such scene and it’s making me worry if posting the review a week or two after release is delivering the review into a world where this film is already irrelevant.

I don’t know if Maxxxine is terrible, that’s what makes this review tricky. Weirdly, the film I keep comparing it to in my head, more than any Brian De Palma film, more than any 80s slasher, more than even the previous two films in the trilogy, is Joker. Very specifically, the reason I kept thinking about Joker was the reliance that Maxxxine has on reference points, to the point of almost parody. Cast your mind back five years, remember how the conversation with Joker was mainly “you’ll like this if you haven’t seen The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver.” I think Maxxxine is the same. It will satisfy those who are vaguely familiar with the films of the time but if you’ve seen even one De Palma film, one giallo film, one straight to video slasher, you’re going to find the film empty. This quote from David Schmader rattled around my head in the aftermath of my viewing, where he says of Showgirls “the subtext is stunning until you realise there is no subtext.” That is Maxxxine. It wears the clothes of a film that’s about something but underneath is merely cheap thrills that are neither cheap enough nor thrilling enough to disguise from the lack of aboutness. And again, the film insists upon itself constantly. It opens with a Bette Davis quote and then closes with “Bette Davis Eyes”, it is desperately trying to seem to be about something when it is deeply and genuinely hollow.

My final question is one that is for the people who have already seen the film, because it’s a point that confounds me; how are we supposed to feel about Maxine as a character? Are we meant to like her? Feel sorry for her? Are we meant to think she’s a great actress? That last question in particular was in my head the whole time because of the opening audition scene. Maxine does a great performance in that audition, but it’s clearly for a film that is terrible, hence them asking to see her breasts and the script having the line “she addresses the camera through her trauma”, a clunker of a line so clunky that even Ti West couldn’t have put that in by accident. Is she meant to be some lost talent forced to work in low rent horror sequels? Or are we meant to be judgemental of her past? She seems ashamed of it and is trying very hard to erase any trace of what happened in Texas, so is she an evil figure? Pearl complicates the conundrum because is that West trying to draw parallels between a murderer and a survivor? Are the two one and the same? Is he spending so long with his head in the sand of subtext that he has failed to include any actual text? It all feels like a mess, one of those trilogies that, when the three films are taken as a whole, weakens each individual product.

So yeah, Maxxxine! It’s pretty rubbish! If you want a handful of wacky performances and a few cool gore scenes and literally nothing else, this will sort you out. However, in the time it took for me to write this review, Longlegs came out and showed that it’s not as hard to make a good horror film as Ti West makes it seem. If you saw the other two in the trilogy, sure, I guess watch this one. If you didn’t, the homework is not worth it and your time would be better spent getting a copy of Body Double and feeling authentic eighties sleaze, not this off brand, sugar-free, “Professor Peppy” knock-off of a film.