Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), snorting Bolivian marching powder and making bank as a human pin cushion in tenderloin epics in the seedy and dangerous underbelly of Tinseltown, but striving her damnedest for thespic legitimacy.
Six years after the events of X (2022), we follow Maxxine Minx (Mia Goth), the sole survivor of what has come to be known as "The Texas Porno Massacre," as her quest for household name-level stardom finds her in the underbelly of the Hollywood adult entertainment industry. It's 1985 and our girl works as a performer at a peepshow, toils as a popular star in the fleshpots of the booming home video hardcore porn market, and auditions for legit mainstream film roles, with the latter being her most longed-for ambition. But the streets of LA are full of misogynistic creeps who are only too eager to rape and kill young women, and Maxine, having survived a singular dire experience six years previous has evolved into a tough-as-nails hardass who packs a gun in case of run-ins with the local vermin.
A knife-wielding Buster Keaton impersonator fucks with the wrong porn star, and receives a lesson in how to properly and decisively bust balls.
But while the garden variety creeps are bad enough, the nighttime is also when the Night Stalker, the real-life serial killer who slew at least fourteen people between April 1984 and August 1985, comes out to hunt, and two of Maxine's co-workers turn up horribly murdered during the midst of his spree. But were they killed by the Night Stalker? The two were both last known to be attending some fancy party up in the hills, a party Maxine was invited along for, but she declined so she could work on her upcoming audition for a role in a horror movie.
Maxine receives a formal invitation card to another party thrown at the same location, an invitation ominously delivered by a sleazy private investigator (Kevin Bacon) who says his client demands her attendance, or he is authorized to reveal to the press her role in the outcome of the Texas Porno Massacre, thus bringing her rising career to an end and possibly landing her in prison. As her friends being meeting hideous fates at the hand of an unseen killer, Maxine readies herself and faces her blackmailer head-on at the house in the hills. What she finds there is a shock that she never saw coming, and a situation from which she might not make it out alive.
That's the plot in a nutshell, and I made sure not to give anything pertinent away. This is another one that is best approached cold, though you should see both X and PEARL before giving it a watch. It directly ties into both, as though the writer-director had too many ideas for just one shocker.
This third installment of Ti West's "X" trilogy (though the second film was a flashback) is more of a mystery/American giallo than a straight-up horror flick, but it does feature several moments of absolutely savage violence and splatter that would have rendered it a hit during the '80's slasher wave. Mia Goth is again superb as Maxine, and Kevin Bacon steals the film as an ultra-dodgy P.I., with the rest of the cast being just as solid. The film is tightly scripted and directed, it looks great, perfectly evokes the coked-up Hollywood of 1985, and it is never dull. That's all I feel comfortable with saying, other than that I would bet good money that it will be looked on as a classic in a few decades.
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