“Maxxxine” is the final chapter in the “X” Trilogy and follows Maxine Minx in 1985, six years after she escaped from Pearl and Howard’s farm in “X.” She now lives in Los Angeles and is pursuing her dream of being a movie star.
She still works as an adult entertainer but gets her big break when she nails an audition for a new horror movie. Yet again, Maxine’s friends and coworkers start to disappear and eventually turn up dead. Detectives are suspicious of Maxine because she knows all the victims.
The killer is copying The Night Stalker and leaving pentagrams on the victims to try to throw off the detectives. The real Night Stalker continues his rampage through Los Angeles as Maxine goes to confront the killer who is after her.
The killer invites Maxine to meet him at a Hollywood Hills home and she cautiously accepts the invitation. The killer is revealed, and she has a final battle with him next to the Hollywood Sign where she imagines her future life, with fame and fortune as she always wanted.
While I do not hate “Maxxxine,” it is my least favorite of the trilogy. Crazy things happen in each of these movies, but “Maxxxine” was the only one where the craziness took me out of the experience the more I thought about it.
The biggest issue I have with “Maxxxine” is the identity of the masked killer, as well as the killer’s motive. The killer is revealed to be Maxine’s father.
He came to Hollywood to find her and expose to the world that Hollywood is a satanic cult that steals people’s children. The way he sets out to prove that is by abducting actresses and killing them, then making it look like The Night Stalker killed them.
As I watched the movie, it was always strange to me why Maxine wanted to separate herself from her survival of the farm massacre as we saw in “X.” One would think that Maxine would use that horrible event to propel herself through Hollywood as a survivor.
Problems aside, there were many things I liked about the movie. The kills were the most graphic yet with exceptional special effects and the setting of the 1980s made everything fit together so well.
The sets and costumes looked amazing, and even though I did not live through the 1980s, I felt like I was really there. I am a huge movie nerd, so seeing the backlots and real-life filming locations at Universal Studios was also a big plus.
“Maxxxine” still works as a nice ending to this trilogy and despite my issues with it, I enjoyed watching every second of it. Some moments in the film are too graphic to describe here, but I never knew how much I needed to see them until I watched this.
Ti West and Mia Goth once again did an incredible job directing and acting respectively, and you can see all the love that went into making “Maxxxine.”