The second MAXXXINE trailer arrives this morning practically dripping fake blood. Elizabeth Debicki’s film director slops it from a bucket onto Lily Collins’s face while shooting a Puritan-themed horror flick; moments later, when Collins shakes hands with Maxine Minx, Mia Goth’s porn-star-turned-Hollywood-hopeful, Debicki remarks, “We’ve all got blood on our hands now.”
When somebody asked Jean-Luc Godard about all the blood in Pierrot Le Fou, he corrected them: “Not blood—red.” Later in the MAXXXINE trailer, a Pollockian splooge of red stuff spatters a rack of hand-lettered VHS porno tapes. Aesthetics! If you’re the type of person who’s going to slow this part of the trailer down and try to make out the (seemingly also fake) movie titles—Hugelander is one of the more printable ones—you are probably already hip to director Ti West’s “X Trilogy” and (metaphorically) seated for its third and supposedly final installment. You have been there, done that, and copped the “One God Damn Fucked Up Horror Picture” T-shirt from the A24 x Online Ceramics merch drop.
For everybody else: In 2022’s exuberantly trashy slasher X, Goth is part of a ‘70s porn-movie crew that books a guest house in Texas to, y’know, “make content” in, before the house’s elderly owners (including Pearl, also played by Goth) mow down everybody except final girl Maxine. (If you’re looking to catch up with this instant horror classic amongst a group of true sickos, A24 has just announced that X will return to theaters for a special one-night engagement on June 18th, accompanied by a post-credit MAXXXINE preview.) In true exploitation fashion, the prequel Pearl dropped mere months later that same year, with Goth as a young Pearl so determined to live out her dreams of movie stardom she ends up murdering her family and feeding future Superman David Corenswet’s corpse to the gators.
Judging by the MAXXXINE trailer, part three finds indefatigable lone survivor Maxine Minx out in L.A. and on the verge of actual fame in one of Debicki’s films, while all manner of threats— including Kevin Bacon as a private eye who shows up with clippings about what’s become known as the Texas Porn Star Massacre, Bobby Cannavale as a police detective, and someone who might be actual 1980s LA-area serial killer Richard Ramirez, more infamously known as the Night Stalker—close in.
Because we bring up Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon in conversation way too often, we feel obligated to point out that we’re getting Neon Demon vibes from this. (Best movie ever made where homicidal models eat Elle Fanning’s eyeballs.) But we’re also just getting vibes, period, from everything— the heavy use of Laura Branigan’s ominous slapper “Self-Control” (a drive-it-like-you-stole-it all-timer in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City), the just-meta-enough use of the Bates Motel set from the Universal Studios backlot, the one glimpse we get of Giancarlo Esposito in a Tony Curtis disco wig as Maxine’s agent.
