Maxxxine

In 1980s Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break, but as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Los Angeles, the trail of murder threatens to reveal her own bloody past.

Hollywood. 1985.

In a time when the Night Stalker was haunting the streets of L.A., when cocaine was king, St. Elmo’s Fire was the number one song in the country, and the Satanic Panic had the stupidest religious assholes in this whole dipshit country in a choke hold, Maxine Minx is a thirty-three year old porn star. Since surviving the killing fields of Texas, she has chased her dreams of Silver Screen stardom all the way out to the sun and surf of the Golden Coast, and straight into adult films. But now, five years later, she can see the end of her value in porn business lying on the horizon, and she wants more. In the neon-soaked world of sex and blood and filth beneath the shadow of the Hollywood sign, Maxine is determined to break free of the shackles that her porn star past has put on her dreams of future stardom.

So, despite the many rejections and slammed doors, she keeps going, keeps trying, always remembering the words her father taught her: “I will not accept a life that I do not deserve.

So when Maxine lands a coveted role as the newest Scream Queen in the upcoming sequel horror film, Puritan 2, helmed by the fearsome British auteur Liz Bender, it may finally be her big break.

But life in Hollywood isn’t easy, especially for a working girl.

The Night Stalker is terrorizing the city, the cops are as useless as always, and people are being warned to stay in at night. In short, Reagan’s America is a trash heap of White Christian Hypocrisy, with their greed and cruelty and entitlement causing poverty and crime to skyrocket in the under-resourced communities that they created through their White Flight and Red-lining. This means that Maxine gets cornered in an alley, while walking home, by a Buster Keaton impersonator armed with a switch blade. Good thing she has a gun.

And well… holy shit. She fucks Buster up.

Because Maxine is an ass-kicker. Being a refugee from Christian Fundamentalist abuse, as well as the lone survivor of a deranged, as well as nude, spree-murdering old crone, a situation that forced her to have to shotgun her way free, Maxine’s life has taught her how to take care of herself.

Unfortunately, that same legacy of pain and blood, the very thing that gave Maxine the gravel in her guts and the spit in her eye, has also gifted her with some very dangerous enemies, and after all these years, they have finally caught up her.

This is really bad timing, as not only are her friends dying, but she’s trying to get ready for her first day of shooting on Puritan 2 as well. This is her, if she fucks this up, she’ll never be anything more in Hollywood than a quickly-aging porn star.

The first problem dogging her heels is a man named John Lebat. A deliberately lackadaisical and loquacious Southern-fried Private Investigator, a man who looks like a twisted mirror image of Jake Gittes, he represents an unknown person from Maxine’s past, someone who knows exactly what happened to her in Texas, and as a result, if Maxine doesn’t agree to meet with them, they are threatening to reveal everything, effectively tanking her new found Hollywood non-fuck flick career before it even has a chance to start.

Maxine isn’t interested.

She definitely not interested, because there’s a dark figure in black leather gloves lurking around and killing her friends. Especially when some of those friends, all of whom attended a mysterious party in the Hollywood Hills, who are eventually found very naked, very dead, and branded with pentagrams, beside the duck pond in the cemetery I used to work at, although in 1985 it went by a different name.

So, with only the weekend to get her shit in order before shooting begins on Puritan 2, with the help of her car keys, as well as her ride or die Agent, Teddy Knight, Maxine TCBs the shit out of John Lebat.

SLIGHTLY RELATED TANGENT: In this film, with every murder, it’s always asked in the news, or by the cops: “Did the Night Stalker do this?” This highlights my one problem with the recent Penguin tv show on HBO. The story of that show starts, let’s say… a week or so after the events in The Batman. This means that a couple days previous in that world, some fucking guy, while dressed up as a kind of gimp meets a bat, fought a bunch of shotgun-wielding incels from the internet—all of whom were specifically trying to murder the mayor—in a whirly-twirly hand-to-hand combat spectacle, while swinging around like Errol Flynn, all while the city was being catastrophically flooded, because those same incels had detonated the Gotham City Sea Wall, all after their leader, a giant incel who called himself The Riddler, waged a prolonged campaign of murder against the leaders of the city, all while specifically taunting The Batman with a series of clues that were buried in the very showy and elaborate riddle-traps that were used to kill prominent citizens very publicly. And during the big climatic flood, this was all on TV. Actual citizens were rescued by The Batman. There must be thousands of photos and videos of this little leather daddy in a cape, swinging around, kicking ass, and pulling people from the rubble.

AND YET…

Not one single person mentions him in the show. Not once. The entire Falcone crime family is murdered, and no one, not the newspaper headlines, not the TV news, not the various thugs and criminals on the street of Gotham says: “Did the Batman do this?” Batman is brand new. He dresses up in a bat-themed outfit. He fights criminals. Mobsters are dead, crime alley gets blown up, and yet NO ONE suspects this weirdo in a bat costume of MAYBE being involved? On top of that, after such a showy debut while saving the mayor, no one in the news even asks: “Where is The Batman?” It makes no sense. The guy is definitely newsworthy! The events of the day of the Flood are definitely newsworthy. And yet, he’s never even mentioned in the news? Not even to sell papers? “The Falcone Family is dead! Was The Batman involved?” The show’s main character even interacted directly with Batman, and no one—not even his young wide-eyed teenage protege—says: “Hey, Oz… did you really see the Batman?” NOT ONCE!

This is the whole show, they never mention this paradigm-shifting mystery man, not once, except for one final shot. It’s a cool shot, sure, not to mention classic, but it really only highlights how there’s this big-ass crazy fucking elephant right in the middle of the room that is Gotham, and NO ONE mentioned him at all.

It’s so weird. It eats at me. It makes no sense.

But I digress…

So, anyway, as the bodies stack up, everything points towards a mysterious house in the Hollywood Hills, one that can only be reached by funicular. It is here, under the Hollywood sign, where the true evil of American society is revealed in a clash of blood and fire. Armed with a trusty shotgun, Maxine braves this deadly crucible, and comes out the other side, a newly minted Hollywood star.

Everything she’s always wanted.

I wasn’t really too big on Ti West’s early stuff, or really the whole mumblecore genre in general, but I really liked X, with it’s 1970‘s schlock style, and I absolutely loooooved Pearl and it’s blood-soaked Golden era of Hollywood style. West nailed the look and feel of both eras. Now, with Maxxxine, we get the neon, big hair, and synthesizers of the 80s, all of which he also does perfectly. In fact, I’d even venture so far as to declare this style to be his best fit. It’s perfect. Having been mostly shot on the oh-so familiar sets of the Universal lot, and also using only the cameras and equipment that would have been available in the 80s, the film sings as an homage to the gore and tits exploitation slasher horror flicks of the 80s. Every moment on screen recalls those movies that lined the walls of every video store, the ones you probably didn’t rent that often, but still, whenever you were browsing the aisles, you’d see their covers, over and over again…

Maxine: Avenging Angel.

But as great as it looks, you could also say that it looks like West’s devotion to the period fetishism of the 80s on display here, was clearly more of a priority than the idea of basic narrative coherence.

That’s fair.

This trilogy has a theme running through each film about the toxicity of the need for stardom, and the way that the hunt for the spotlight can destroy a person, as well as a commentary on society’s belief that the sole value of women lies in their being perceived as desirable, but in Maxxxine, it’s definitely less well-articulated than it was in the previous films. It’s also fair to say that this film doesn’t have the same drive as the first two, the same force propelling it. Beneath the surface, the film feels all around thinner, at least narratively and thematically, and its climax under the Hollywood sign is a bit clunky, and feels weirdly rushed.

In the movie, Maxine’s big break comes when she is cast in the big upcoming sequel horror film, Puritan 2. And much like the entire film itself, it’s not only an homage to all sorts of Hollywood films and era, as well as specifically genre horror films, it’s also self-referential, referring to itself as a “B movie with A ideas.” That’s a fair way to sum up all three of these films, but it also highlights this film’s main problem, and that is the fact that, when you set out to make an homage to schlocky genre flicks, sometimes all you end up making is a schlocky genre movie.

Just ask Tarantino…

But let’s be honest here, sometimes… there’s nothing wrong with being just a schlocky genre film either, right? I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right?

Gory, funny, smart, gross, a bit unnerving, focusing on our culture’s delusional dreams of stardom, while set in the shithole that was Reagan’s 1908s morning in America, Maxxxine is a bright and fun tour of those familiar big screen landmarks of Hollywood. From the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, to Hollywood Boulevard, to the Universal Studios backlot, to the Revolving Lounge at the BonaVista and the Chinese theatre, to the Hills above, with its famous Sign, it’s a place of beautiful dreams and sordid realities.

And all of this is used to tell us a story that shows that ultimately, the patriarchy and the church are two of this society’s most evil and toxic roots.