What we have here with X is a good, old-fashioned slice-’em-up homage to 1970s grindhouse flicks. Specifically, 1979, wherein we find Maxine (Mia Goth), she of the constellation of a birthmark over one eye, determined to escape the drab life of a stripper in the even drabber boondocks of Texas. Thanks to her boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson), some liberally applied sparkly blue eye-shadow, and a whole mess of cocaine, she’s going to live her dream of fame and fortune by starring in Wayne’s maiden excursion into porn films. She’s also going to learn more than she ever imagined about the psychology of old people stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Wayne has a vision that the future of porn is on home video, and so with fledgling auteur filmmaker RJ (Owen Campbell), his demure girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), Jackson (Scott Mescudi)) an ex-Marine with a very special skill set, and his girlfriend, Bobbie-Lynne (Britanny Snow) another stripper from Wayne’s club, Bayou Burlesque, he heads out to a remote farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to film his masterpiece. As RJ puts it, it’s possible to make a good dirty movie, though it’s Bobbie Lynen who points out the more provocative camera angles that RJ missed.
The location is a building on the property of Howard (Stephen Ure in a grotesque prosthetic of old age after a hard life) and Pearl (Mia Goth in equally well done prosthetics that make them both just this side of the walking dead). Our crew won’t be staying in the farmhouse to film their ticket to the good life, THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER, but rather, in the rented outbuilding that served as barracks during the Civil War. It’s roomy, private, and, according to RJ, cinematically wonderful. It’s also just far enough from the main house so that the cries of pleasure can’t be heard over there.
Naturally, something’s not quite right with Howard and Pearl. He totes a shotgun and a deeply suspicious attitude. She tends to wander around, peeking in windows whose curtains are not drawn while filming. Howard’s warning to his guests to be discreet out of respect for her was all for naught. Alas.
Writer/director Ti West has great regrard for the grindhouse genre, but he’s not above tweaking it to tease his audience. Never has an alligator been used to better effect in that way. (N.B: I speak as the daughter of the man who produced John Sayles’ ALLIGATOR) Also note the way RJ pontificates about how to cut a film, which serves as foreshadowing of West’s style.
But West’s real talent is for making this more than a mere gore fest. Sure, there’s viscera hanging from a damaged headlight, and, sure, sharp objects are deployed in various injurious ways against the fragility of human anatomy. In the midst of the lurking Pearl and the menacing Howard, he injects a scene where our young people discuss the difference between sex and attraction while also dissecting the current state of western morality. Just when it starts to smack of pandering, he injects a twist that is not just bracing, but is also hilarious for the way it reveals deep-seated hypocrisies in those who consider themselves more enlightened that the proles.
West is not done with us, though. Throughout X, he explores the dangers of sexual frustration and gender politics. As Bobbie-Lynne puts it so succinctly. What we do turns people on, and that scares some of them. It’s an issue that threads its way through the story by way of a television preacher (Simon Prast) blaring forth from black-and-white televisions everywhere, exhorting his unmistakably fundamentalist congregation to reject the evils of Satan, as in sex. He warns that his is a forgiving god, but that every man has his limits. Indeed, transgressive behavior in all its shade and implications permeate the proceedings, pricking the conscience in most uncomfortable ways.
X deftly mixes camp and horror with a love story that is at once poignant and monstrous. There are images that will haunt you that have nothing to do with murder. It will creep you out, while also delivering one of the best punch lines in a movie so far this year, not to mention a post-credit sequence that leaves us panting for the prequel set for release later this year.
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