⭐BETTER ENDING⭐ - MaXXXine (2024)
I've thought of a ⭐BETTER ENDING⭐ for MaXXXine (2024).
In what I consider to be my intro post/About page/mission statement for Better Endings, I mention that the idea of starting this was born from seeing movies with my wife, discussing them afterward, and then thinking up better ways they could’ve ended. And so it is with MaXXXine (2024).
That said, HEADS-UP(!): There will be spoilers below for X (2022), MaXXXine, and - to a lesser extent - Pearl (2022). This is your warning to stop reading if you haven’t seen any of these movies yet or if care about that sort of thing.
To the power of independent cinema!
X tells the story of a small group of independent pornographic filmmakers who, in the summer of 1979, drove out to a farmhouse that they rented as their filming location in middle-of-nowhere Texas. When the elderly couple that owns the farmhouse discovers what in Sam Hill is going on, the filmmakers are picked off one by one. One of the actresses manages to turn the tables on the couple, does them in, and drives off into the sunrise leaving the whole wake of a mess in her rear-view mirror.
Some of the action (not that kind of action) throughout X takes place inside the elderly couple’s home (another house on their farmland property), where a TV is constantly dialed into a channel with a televangelist spouting off scripture and praying that his daughter is saved and returns back to the home she left behind. The runaway daughter, as it turns out, is none other than this tale’s final girl, the actress that drives away, Maxine Minx (Mia Goth).
Things end with cops arriving at the scene of the crimes. One of them finds the filmmakers’ camera. I wonder if whatever’s in the can there will pop up again later?
I will not accept a life I do not deserve.
Fast-forward to 1985 Los Angeles… Maxine’s made quite a name for herself within the adult film industry but she’s hungry for more and is hoping to break into the mainstream; she auditions for and gets a lead role in horror film sequel, The Puritan II.
The film’s director, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Debicki), takes Maxine under her wing and very much wants her to commit herself completely to the film; Elizabeth knows it’s doubly-hard for any successful female in Hollywood to stay relevant and twice as easy for one to be left behind when things don’t go to plan.
And then a mysterious VHS tape arrives at Maxine’s apartment.
This is all happening while LA is experiencing a rash of murders being connected to a singular source that the media’s taken to calling the “Night Stalker” (a real event and serial killer that happened and existed). As these killings continue, people in Maxine’s orbit are picked off one-by-one.
Around this time, a private dick (Kevin Bacon just chewing it up) starts pestering Maxine about her past, says his client’s been looking for her and wants to meet her, and that he knows about what happened out in Texas a few years back - he’d hate for the cops to catch wind of that.
Speaking of the cops, two of LA’s finest detectives slowly start to pick up on the fact that Maxine seems to be the one person that had ties to all three of the most recent killings, so they start barking up her tree but she gives them even less time than she did the P.I. While trying to build out their case, one of them posits that the killings could be the work of a copycat, someone intentionally making their killings appear as though they were done by the “Night Stalker” just to mess with them.
(In the interest of time and/or too many spoilers, I’ve so far left out some of the side goings-on, and I’m skipping over a fun moment that brings us to the messy third act starting…now!)
After a final confrontation with the P.I., Maxine decides to go meet his client who is currently staying in a mansion in the hills. The client turns out to be her father, the televangelist. After a small tussle, he’s able to subdue her and tie her up poolside. An entourage of his hooded disciples film his attempts to save his daughter, to free her from the demons that have plagued her, that have turned her into a runaway porn actress. But of course, he’s the one that made her into the person that she is, someone that will not accept a life she does not deserve.
As he did with his previous victims, he’s about to brand Maxine with the mark of the devil (a pentagram) (this is a detail I left out earlier, the victims are branded with pentagrams). Little did either of them know, but the cops were following Maxine’s every move and a crazy, clumsy shootout takes places at the mansion where, once again, Maxine is the only one to walk away from a bit of a mess.
The movie ends with Maxine filming some kind of dream sequence; Maxine is a fucking star.
Contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as bad press.
MaXXXine is rife with tropes, many of them nodding in a pleasant fashion to so many of the genre films that came before it. That Maxine’s father should be the one killing those closest to her - who’ve got to be deviants themselves, plagued by devils of their own, also in need of saving - just to get to her, is not a shocker or a twist of any kind. A shadowy stalker in black leather gloves, trench coat, and fedora, slashing up victims like a “Night Stalker” might certainly seems like the work of someone hiding their own agenda behind the tabloid-like headlines of the day; to beat a devil you have to become a devil.
But the third act treats the viewers kinda like dummies, and I have a problem with that. Flashbacks to things we just saw 30 minutes ago are peppered about like we’d’ve forgotten them already, or like we wouldn’t put the clues together ourselves. And the clumsiest shootout (that it’s as laughable as it is has got to be the point, right?) culminating in Maxine blowing off her dad’s head point-blank with a sawed-off… messy as it is, it seems a little too tidy of a way to bring us to that coda. So here’s what I’m thinking…
Well, we've all got blood on our hands now...
Scrap the flashbacks. They’re useless. We know that Maxine’s friends mentioned “going to a party at a mansion on a hill.”
Cut the coda. It’s not fulfilling.
At some point, reveal that Maxine’s dad might have actually only killed one of the victims. All the murders would be pinned on him, naturally, but let the audience in on it somehow (maybe by how the victims were branded, or something being different from the other killings).
Maxine kills her dad. Keep it, it’s satisfying enough.
Then cut to: The back of a shadowy figure in a black leather trench coat and fedora. A black leather-gloved hand moves over a table of trophies and keepsakes from some of the killings and/or newspaper clippings about the murders. A voiceover of a woman talking about being in the belly of the beast and having to devote yourself to your art echoes as the camera slowly moves around the figure and pans up from across the table to reveal… Elizabeth, the director. Her plan to remove all distractions from Maxine’s life so that she’ll devote herself to the film have fallen into place. She starts to smile and cackle for an eternity (a few minutes) as the credits roll - an allusion to, and slightly different take on, the ending of Pearl (2022), with its hold on Goth’s unflinching, eye-watering smile to Howard, the camera, the viewer.
Now that’s what I call… a ⭐BETTER ENDING⭐!