★★☆☆☆

Perhaps MaXXXine was always doomed from the start. After all, its predecessors, X and Pearl, were so narratively intertwined that they were filmed back-to-back and released during the same year, effectively chaining the two together for life. You can’t talk about X without talking about Pearl and vice versa. Add to that the high praise both movies received, and how could a third entry in the franchise possibly compete?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. Set six years after the events of X, MaXXXine follows adult film star Maxine Minx as she navigates the jungle of 1985’s Hollywood. After being cast as the lead of the horror film The Puritan II, Maxine believes she’s destined to be a star, but a mysterious killer threatens to reveal her past, putting in jeopardy everything she’s worked so hard for.

While I wasn’t immediately against the idea of a third X film, I knew that the mere concept of one would cause some problems, namely that X and Pearl already made for a complete-feeling duology. A third film would have to extend the story in a way that feels justified, or focus entirely on a new storyline. MaXXXine goes for the former, but the ways it does so feel so forced; it’s as if an original screenplay got reworked into being a sequel for this already existing franchise.

The events of X don’t feel like they contribute to MaXXXine’s central conflict in any meaningful way. Rather, every reference feels like it’s there to remind you that this is, in fact, a direct sequel to X and not an original new film. This makes this sequel feel unnecessary in the complete opposite way Pearl didn’t, as that prequel was practically a requirement to watch whether you liked X or not.

Therein lies an immediate problem with turning X into more than a duology: its main villain, Pearl, is dead, and her backstory has already been told. Logically, there’s no way she can return to a direct follow-up to X other than in flashbacks or hallucinations.

MaXXXine does attempt to show how the events of X affected Maxine, but these attempts feel half-baked and underdeveloped, especially because of the decision to set this film six years later. We never find out how, say, Maxine managed to stay unlinked to the X murders despite the police finding their tape, or how she dealt with calls from the victims’ families, if she ever did. “There’s no way anyone can pin it on me,” she says in the movie. How did she manage to do that?

Had director Ti West worked a few things around, this could’ve easily been a new film about a starting actress being hunted down by a mysterious killer in Los Angeles. Really, I wish the film could’ve just gone down the route of an unrelated killer, because then, we’d be rid of many filler scenes and the constant reminder that we could be watching certain better Ti West films instead.

Perhaps a completely new storyline would’ve made MaXXXine feel like an unsatisfying sequel, but better an unsatisfying sequel that’s a satisfying film than one that’s as unsatisfying as both.

Speaking of the killer, MaXXXine’s killer is probably one of the most boring villains in slasher history. Never once do you feel the threat of their looming presence, like they could be anywhere at any time and could pound a character when they least expect it. For someone who’s meant to worry Maxine greatly, never once until the third act did it feel like Maxine was in any real danger.

Another disappointing thing is that where X and Pearl had such memorable characters like Bobby-Lynne and Mitsy, the characters of MaXXXine are so paper thin, they’re pretty much nothing more than future corpses. I remember them more for the actors who played them than I do for any noteworthy character trait. When they die, you feel nothing, because the film never bothered to make them anything more than one-dimensional.

Granted, many slashers have underwritten characters simply there to be dead meat, but these slashers at least didn’t falter in providing fun and plentiful kills. In this regard, MaXXXine is the absolute tamest in the X trilogy, because there’s barely anything here to make this a satisfying slasher. The kills in MaXXXine happen so few and far between, and they either happen off-screen or so quickly, they feel like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments.

It’s debatable whether this is a slasher movie at all. It’s more of a crime one, though one that lacks any thrill or mystery, and if it is a slasher, it’s not a scary one at all. The film has no suspense, no tension, no edge-of-your-seat moments. It’s gory, but even the gore feels like overcompensation, like a way to keep the horror fans pleased if they didn’t like the movie’s crime film approach.

Even then, the film could’ve kept that approach while simultaneously delivering more effective scary scenes. After all, Pearl was largely inspired by 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, and I don’t remember that film being the murder fest Pearl was.

The thing I find most frustrating about MaXXXine, though, is its utter head-scratcher of a tone. The film lays its 80s setting on thick, and the first 15 minutes alone are chock full of 80s references left and right. However, MaXXXine’s cheesiness doesn’t just end there. Much like Scream 3, this movie has this meta “film within a film” narrative. 

The film Maxine stars in, The Puritan II, has her as a 1950s housewife, similar to how Pearl was a 1918 housewife. Her audition monologue is meant to mirror Maxine’s own experiences. And in one scene, the director even calls The Puritan II a “B movie with A ideas,” an obvious commentary on the film MaXXXine itself: it wants to be a self-aware B movie with themes like the obsession of Hollywood and fame.

However, MaXXXine takes this “self-aware B movie” idea too damn literally, especially with its third act. There are so many moments of excessive visuals, corny over-acting, and dumb scenarios that are meant to be humorous but contain no proper punchlines. It aims to be campy, but it’s so overwrought that it’s hard to take even the least bit seriously. At times, it felt like watching a parody of the movie I was currently watching.

This meta approach also gives MaXXXine an annoyingly smug aura — it’s over-the-top, it knows it’s being over-the-top, and it wants you to be impressed by its self-awareness.

Ti West has stated the possibility of more X films. Only time will tell if those films come to fruition, but if they don’t, MaXXXine seems unlikely to be as well-remembered as X and Pearl, despite it making the most money at the box office. Maxine herself may be adamant about refusing to accept a life she does not deserve, but she’s going to have to accept that the X entry named after her is the worst film in the franchise so far.

P.S. That Obsession song is an absolute jam, though.