MaXXXine (2024)
Ah, MAXXXINE—the latest neon-splattered, blood-drenched fever dream from Ti West, set in the seedy, slicked-back Los Angeles of the 1980s. It’s a film bursting with gritty VHS nostalgia, but alas, I was forced to endure it in soulless, high-definition perfection of a god-damn movie theater. This is the kind of movie that demands to be watched on a dimly flickering tube TV, ideally with lines of static crawling up and down the screen. But instead, the theater cruelly insisted on screening it in 4K resolution.
Mia Goth returns as Maxine, plowing through Hollywood. Watching her power walk through alleyways of sleaze, I felt a pang of sadness that her character would never feel the damp warmth of VHS tracking issues. Her gun-wielding, ball crushing, scenes—while crisp and meticulously lit—were practically begging to be experienced in blurry, wobbling fast-forward, or better yet, interspersed with ghostly remnants of whatever was last recorded on the tape. Alas, every blood spray and jagged scream in Dolby Atmos was nothing but a reminder that the purity of analog horror is dead and buried, replaced by cold, merciless clarity.
The plot? Something about revenge, self-discovery, and a bunch cocaine. I imagine there were some interesting plot twists, though I can’t say for sure, because in the good old days, my VHS copy would have cut off around the climactic moment to reveal the local news or a home-recorded episode of Family Matters that got taped over. Instead, I had to actually watch all 110 minutes in pristine order, and there’s just something so fucking hollow and pointless about that.
There was no possibility of fiddling with a remote or slapping the slide of an old Zenith for that perfect hint of static. No disorienting rewind glitch to replay Goth’s iconic monologue. Instead, I sat there, a slave to crystal-clear resolution, helpless to the theater’s technological tyranny. What I wouldn’t give for a tracking issue to mangle her lines so I could lean forward and think, Did she just say what I think she said?
In the end, MAXXXINE was every bit the mesmerizing, visceral horror odyssey that critics predicted. But without the grainy glow of a battered old Magnavox, I couldn’t help but feel like the film itself was only halfway there, like a synth wave without the warble, a slasher movie without the shrieking cassette rewind, a scream heard too clearly.
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