Movie Review

New horror film MaXXXine sees its porn star heroine go Hollywood

Mia Goth in MaXXXine

Mia Goth in MaXXXine.

Photo courtesy of A24

The horror movies X and Pearl were surprise indie hits in 2022, with Pearl – a prequel to X – being a literal surprise as its production was conceived of and approved during the waning days of the shooting of the first film. Director Ti West and star/producer Mia Goth have now teamed up for a third film in the series, the suggestively named MaXXXine.

Goth reprises her role as Maxine, an adult film actress who, after surviving the events in X, has made her way to Hollywood circa 1985 in hopes of finding roles in mainstream films. An audition for a horror film directed by Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) seems to lead to a great opportunity, but a serial killer on the loose named The Night Stalker starts to interfere with her life.

Not only do Maxine and others around her have to fear for their lives, but she also gets hounded by private detective John Labat (Kevin Bacon) and police detectives Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (Bobby Cannavale). Determined and more than capable of taking care of herself, Maxine tries her best to push forward with her big break while avoiding the distractions and deaths piling up around her.

West had specific goals with the first two films in the series, as X was an homage to classic slasher movies, and Pearl as much a Technicolor melodrama as a horror film. MaXXXine seems to be almost a loving tribute to the seediness of 1980s Los Angeles and the film industry. The way in which West shoots the movie makes it feel like there’s a layer of grime over the camera, with the whole story feeling dirty, and not in the X-rated way.

However, for a film that seems to want to entice with sex and depravity, it actually contains relatively little of either. West does go for shock value in a few scenes, but overall the movie has a curious lack of momentum. When deaths do come, they seem to happen haphazardly, both at the hands of the serial killer and otherwise. West always had a storytelling purpose for the killings in the first two films, but he lost the thread in that respect for this film.

The story of the film entails Maxine going Hollywood, and there’s the feeling that West may have overstepped by including a bunch of well-known actors this time around. Individually, Bacon, Debicki, Monaghan, Cannavale, and Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine’s agent give fun and interesting performances, but the cumulative effect is distracting. It doesn’t help that most of their arcs, save for that of Debicki, are underwhelming.

Goth, though, delivers another compelling performance even when the story seems to meander. Her distinctive look and personality serve the character well, making her a person who’s equal parts appealing, conniving, and scary. She’s the clear star of the show, and everyone and everything revolves around her, although special notice should be made of Moses Sumney as her friend Leon, who gets a few scene-stealing moments.

MaXXXine needed to have a much more consistent story to be considered as good as the first two films in the series. The presence of Goth, who knows exactly how she wants to play her character, automatically elevates the film, which is a necessity since little else keeps it that interesting.

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MaXXXine opens in theaters on July 5.

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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