MaXXXine 4K 2024 2160p WEB-DL

The final installment of the "X" slasher trilogy. 1985. After surviving the end of the first movie, porn star Maxine (Mia Goth) arrives in Los Angeles and gets a role in a second-rate horror movie. Gradually, the heroine encounters more blood and horror.

MaXXXine 4K Review
Ty West's trilogy of sex, fame and violence has come to a close, which is more like a small stop on the itinerary - the series is not going to say goodbye to the big screens forever. The horrormaker is already thinking about how to continue the franchise and what incarnation Mia Goth's character will experience. In "X" the director sang the nightmares of Southern Gothic and horrors of the 70's, in the prequel "Pearl" revealed the sinister charm of Technicolor, and in "Maxine XXX" got to the alluring neon glitter of Los Angeles 80's and contrasts jallo. The last tape least impressed the audience and critics - we venture to assume that the problem lies in the perception: from film to film changed not only the style, but also the intonation. "Maxine XXX" is contraindicated to consider seriously, it is worth putting aside existential sadness and enjoy the shameless pasquila on the horrors of the era of thoughtful experience of trauma. The screens are a hymn to the last girls who are more immortal than the maniacs who stalk them.

And she left her grandfather and left her grandmother (though it was harder): Maxine finds herself in the arms of a monster fox in 1985 Hollywood. There are believers on strike all around, offended by the religious horror The Puritan, the Night Stalker is wielding in the dark streets, and there's no way the pavilions can mix decent-looking fake blood. The porn star is not very involved in the perturbations of time - much more than the present, she is burdened by the past: her childhood in her daddy's cult and the "Texas Porn Star Massacre" on the farm. The traumas take on flesh in the form of a literal avatar in leather gloves, a mysterious killer who rinses in the blood of the actresses around her while Maxine gets hooked on drugs - white powder and public confession.

"X"-series looks to be a unique pop-culture construct, especially in the horror pool of the 21st century. Bypassing the linear order dictated by the logic of chronology, the tapes can be rearranged or watched individually - each would work as a solo performance. But it is the combinations (also arbitrary and variable) that give birth to volume and help form a coherent statement. Maxine completes the first ring of the spiral - where Pearl broke under the weight of wartime trauma and her mother's unlovedness, Maxine bade farewell to old grudges and (spoiler from the trailer!) became a star. You can credit the achievement not only to her willpower and unwavering inner core, but also to the change of eras - emancipation in the '80s was more accessible than in the '30s, as was a woman's right to control her body.

Both heroines are driven by a hurricane of inner anger that devours everything in its path. But the tempestuous rage burned a hole in Pearl's heart and emptied the bottomless well of ambition, while Maxine rolled over all the troubles. Having had enough of bodily intimacy and connections of all shades, she was no longer looking for love, but for fame as an accomplished fact, not for the consequences of approval. Pearl said goodbye to her oppressive mother, betraying her to the fire, but tortured herself with the thirst for the warmth of someone else's body until her death - enough to remember the night hug in "X" and how she pressed herself against the cold corpse in the prequel's finale. Maxine, on the other hand, dreams of missing no one and burying all the past that drags her to the bottom at once: her father with his peculiar ideas about what is best for his daughter, and the survivor's complex that comes with the trophy of the last girl - the dawn sun on the farm kissed only her cheeks decorated with a birthmark.

The becoming of the mirror-fate heroines is articulated quite concretely and straightforwardly, the rhymes are sound, Goth is honing her acting skills, and the crocodiles are clacking their jaws. It's more curious to consider West's co-dependent relationship with his favorite genre, in which the director has been swimming for a dozen years. Ty is a meticulous and enthusiastic stylizer and cinephile: the jewel-like recreation of film scuffs, vivid transitions and recognizable montage phrases can be called his directorial credo. It's worth a look at his filmography to be sure: the indie auteur has mastered many subgenres with modest means - from found footage ("Mystery") to mumblecore ("Secrets of the Old Hotel"), from slasher ("House of the Devil") to western ("In the Valley of Violence"). "Maxine XXX" is not one bit inferior to its predecessors in an ocean of references - neo-noirs, slashers, jallos, LA Sleaze, one could go on for a long time.

In the variety of formal artistic techniques, it is much more interesting to flip through the encyclopedia of horror's development and discuss the stigma surrounding the genre. In the '70s horror scared "prudes" and was considered a pleasure of a pornographic nature, while in the '80s it pissed off believers by flirting with the devil in an era when the States were gripped by satanic panic. Slashers, which gained crazy popularity in the '80s, still carried the stigma of being a forbidden pleasure for drive-in theaters and a teenage joy free of elaborate meanings. Director Elizabeth Debicki's heroine, Elizabeth Bender, self-effacingly explains how to make a horror sequel into a cinematic masterpiece and a porn actress into a first-tier Hollywood star. But it's worth looking back at "X" to realize that, according to West, horror does not need indulgence and the right to be called the highest art - it's enough to be a fun massacre without brakes.

"Pearl" is composed and looks like a trendy horror from the 2020s, which is what A24 Studios, which released West's trilogy, is known for. With a vivid visual code, potential for merch sales, and a vise of trauma that drags the girl in red down to the alligators, it's not at all surprising that it was the dressed-up prequel that became the trilogy's favorite installment and the most swirling film in the series. The mentally unstable heroine endlessly feels sorry for herself and spiritually perishes under the weight of her circumstances without breaking free. Maxine's duel with her traumas is drawn out literally in running from a private detective (Kevin Bacon) and hand-to-hand combat with daddy issues (firearms at the ready!). But it was worth changing the slobberneck tactics and mockingly drawing out the trauma metaphor at crazy slasher speeds, as A24's horror mechanism began to look rather comical and parodic: a spectacular blonde psychotherapeutically runs around the movie sets until the past (or agents of the past) catch up with her.

Instead of endless reflection and lamenting over unhealed mental wounds, Maxine prefers to act and rush forward - over heads, hands and even other people's genitals if she has to. Trauma can be conquered, trauma can be monetized, and fame exists in multiple dimensions, the only thing left is popularity. The indie horror maker has pulled off what Greta Gerwig failed to do in Barbie: at the expense of A24 Studios, Ty West has made a movie that blatantly mocks fashionable horror movies to remind us that the love of horror is not a current trend, but a cinephile's joy in any era.