(18) 104mins IT’S 1980s Hollywood, and Maxine Minx, an adult movie star, manages to bag a part in a mainstream horror movie. But her dreams of hitting the big time are at risk of being thwarted when she is stalked by a serial killer. Writer-director Ti West returns with a cracking third instalment in his mini horror franchise.
MaXXXine is a direct sequel to X, a 2022 horror set in 1979 in which Mia Goth played an aspiring porn star hounded by elderly serial killer Pearl during a shoot at a Texan farmhouse. Later that year, West released Pearl, a prequel set in 1919 that explores the origins of the murderous Pearl, once again played by Goth. This time we see Goth’s Maxine hired by ball-breaking director Elizabeth Bender (The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki in 80s shoulder pads) to be in her horror movie, with the actress believing that her time for Hollywood fame has finally come.
As several people she knows start turning up dead, Maxine is being threatened by sleaze-ball private eye John Labat ( Kevin Bacon ) who has been hired by someone from her past to bring her back to the fold. With the support of her agent-cum-lawyer Teddy (Giancarlo Esposito), Maxine takes the law into her own hands despite being offered help by a squabbling LAPD cop duo (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan). Having paid homage to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in X and to The Wizard Of Oz in Pearl, West tries his hands at ’80s video nasties — the name given to the era’s VHS slashe.
