'MaXXXine' Is Cheap-Chic Horror At Its Finest

A superb Mia Goth and Giancarlo Esposito capture the sleaze and wild ambition of '80s Hollywood in writer-director Ti West's concluding chapter of his popular slasher series. And, most interestingly — within its first 30 minutes, even — it scrubs off the grime of the ’80s to morph into a “Cinderella”-esque romcom classic that helped usher in a cleaner, more gentrified ’90s era.. It’s fascinating to think about that movie alongside “MaXXXine,” writer-director Ti West’s dazzling, 1985-set Hollywood horror threequel so entrenched in the filth of that time that it’s hard to imagine how anyone then could have fathomed a way out of it. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of the conservative Moral Majority and puritanical culture of the Reagan era — which was also a theme of the ’70s-set “X,” the first film in West’s trilogy — continues to reverberate on TV sets and protests.. Where 2022’s terrific “X,” in which Goth, Jenna Ortega, Scott Mescudi and others portray a porn film crew on a soon-to-be blood-bathed set in Texas, sharply engaged with and challenged the politics of its time, “MaXXXine” simply lives it. What makes the movie so engrossing, particularly as a supposed nod to “Pretty Woman,” is that it’s an equally unconventional Hollywood tale, but “MaXXXine” is soaked in ’80s muck. Giancarlo Esposito dons gaudy red hair as Maxine’s batshit agent; Kevin Bacon has goofy gold teeth as the trashy private eye who knows Maxine’s unhinged past; and Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale play detectives who banter like two rejects from “Moonlighting.” Adding to that, West grounds the film with the still relevant, precarious nature of female mortality — particularly sexualized female mortality — in a landscape that idolizes and destroys it in equal measure.