Culture | Film Summer is a notoriously dry time for top-quality film releases. But fear not: for you viewing pleasure, there’s a mega-violent Indian fist fight on a train, delicate foreign musings on life, beavers going slapstick bonkers and..
. the simply astounding Mia Goth in MaXXXine. Sleazily stupendous Mia Goth is back in the finale of Ti West’s horror trilogy as sleazily stupendously named Maxine Minx.
And if you grimaced and winced while adoring the previous, ever-so-slightly-underwhelming instalments (X and Pearl), this blows the bloody doors off. It’s 1985, ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’ is blasting out of Maxine’s open-top Mercedes, and West is cranking up the sordid neon underbelly of Hollywood to 11. A porn star with a sinister past, Maxine is trying to make it straight in the movie biz.
Meanwhile, there’s an occultist serial killer laying waste to Tinseltown’s supposedly fallen women, and who has a particular curiosity in Maxine. The only clue to their identity is the gorgeously gut-churning creak of their stiff, slimy, black leather gloves. There’s also the never-less-than-awesome Kevin Bacon as a gold-toothed private eye whose morals appear to have been thrown into the gutter at birth.
He is very, very insistent Maxine meets his client. She, of course, doesn’t give a flying f*** what he wants. Elizabeth Debicki also pops as the Svengali director of Maxine’s new film (the ironically titled The Puritan II).
As the blood flows as freely as Ma.
