Worth Mentioning - Divine Intervention

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Mutants and Maxine.

THE NEW MUTANTS (2020)

The Marvel Comics adaptation The New Mutants had a rough ride out into the world. It got off to a very promising start, with writer/director Josh Boone and co-writer Knate Lee stepping up to make an entry in Fox’s X-Men franchise that wouldn’t only be a smaller project than the average X-Men movie, but would also be a horror movie set in the X-Men universe. A horror movie that was drawing inspiration from the one of the greats, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Boone assembled a strong cast for the film, which went into production in 2017. Then problems arose. Fox wanted reshoots, but those reshoots never got scheduled because Fox was being acquired by Disney and executives were focused on working that out. So The New Mutants sat on the shelf for a couple years. The longer it sat there, the more negativity was stirred up about the project. Would it ever be released? Was it a disastrous mess? Fox and Disney merged. The movie ended up in the hands of Disney, who weren’t very interested in it because it was a Fox Marvel movie, not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at Disney. So they just tossed it into theatres in August of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic lockdown. It was poorly received, and to the surprise of no one, it was a box office bomb. Since so few people saw it, and so few cared by the time it was released, its existence seems to have largely been forgotten.

It took me four years to even get around to watching this one, but when I did, I found that it was much better than its bad reputation had implied. There’s not much in the way of comic book action (at least, not until the climactic sequence), but when taken as a teen horror movie that wears the Dream Warriors influence on its sleeve, it’s an entertaining watch.

The movie starts with a traumatic event: a young girl named Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) and her father, Cheyenne Native Americans, are running for their lives as a tornado hits their reservation. Dani’s father says it’s a tornado, anyway. There’s reason to suspect that it’s something else... and whatever it is ends up destroying the reservation and killing Dani’s dad. She is knocked out, and when she regains consciousness she finds she’s in a remote hospital where the only inhabitants are a group of other teenagers – Charlie Heaton as Sam Guthrie, Anya Taylor-Joy as Illyana Rasputin, Henry Zaga as Bobby da Costa, and Maisie Williams as Rahne Sinclair – and Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga).

Reyes tells Dani that she and the other teens are mutants with special abilities and they need to stay in this hospital until they learn to control their powers and Reyes can be sure they’re not a danger to themselves. In the meantime, they’re stuck there, as the hospital is surrounded by an impenetrable force field.

Just like Dani recently experienced tragedy, all of the other teens have traumatic events in their past – and soon they’re having nightmarish visions of people tied to those events. Visions that have the ability to harm them, much like Freddy Krueger kills people in their nightmares in the Elm Street movies. Eventually they’ll learn exactly what’s going on with these visions, and that Reyes is hiding some sinister secrets. And then it’s time for them to put their mutant powers to use so they can get out of this place.

I guess The New Mutants was held up to a higher standard than the average horror movie, since it’s part of the X-Men universe, because I ended up thinking it was a decent horror flick.

MAXXXINE (2024)

Back in the early days of the pandemic, writer/director Ti West headed to New Zealand to make his 1979-set slasher X – and while sitting out the mandatory quarantine, West and X star Mia Goth, who was set to pull double duty in the film, playing both aspiring movie star Maxine Minx (who is getting her screen acting start in no-budget porn) and homicidal old woman Pearl, wrote a screenplay for the 1918-set prequel Pearl, which examined exactly how Pearl, once an aspiring star herself, went off the deep end. A24, the production and distribution company behind X, immediately gave Pearl the greenlight, so West and Goth got to make those two movies back-to-back. The result was a pair of modern classics. While individual fans have their preferences, while some liking X better than Pearl and others the opposite, both were extremely well received. (I have written appreciation articles for both of them, but if I had to choose between the two, X is more my speed.) Since X and Pearl proved to be so popular, and because West still had at least one more story to tell about the characters, a third film in the franchise got the greenlight. And two years after the other movies, we got MaXXXine.

Like viewers were split on X and Pearl, MaXXXine has also turned out to be a divisive film, which some viewers finding it to be the best of the trilogy and others finding it to be the weakest of the bunch. Unfortunately, I find myself in the latter camp... but while I didn’t enjoy MaXXXine as much as I enjoyed X or Pearl, I still had a good time watching it.

The story catches up with Goth’s Maxine Minx in Hollywood in 1985, six years after the events of X. She has continued working in porn, but now she has a chance to become a crossover success by landing a role in the horror film The Puritan 2, which is being filmed on the Universal back lot (which allows Maxine to stop by the Bates Motel set at a couple different points in the movie). While Maxine pursues her long-awaited mainstream stardom, people around her start turning up dead, murdered by a black-gloved killer... and no, it’s not the Night Stalker, even though there are moments where the movie acknowledges that real-world killer was terrorizing the Los Angeles area at this time. Whoever this killer is, they know about Maxine’s experience on Pearl’s property six years earlier and has even obtained footage from the porno she was working on back then, lifted from a police evidence locker.

X and Pearl had impressive casts, and MaXXXine is no different. West may have even gone a bit too heavy on the A-listers this time around, with some bigger names showing up in roles that didn’t really require a bigger name. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Debicki as the director of The Puritan 2, Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale as the detectives investigating the murders, Lily Collins as the star of The Puritan, Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine’s agent, Kevin Bacon as a private investigator who follows Maxine around, Sophie Thatcher as an FX artist, and musicians Moses Sumney and Halsey as friends of Maxine’s. Simon Prast also has some scenes, reprising the role of Maxine’s televangelist father as seen in X, and goes so over-the-top he comes off like a flesh and blood cartoon character.

MaXXXine is a good slasher flick that I might come to like more and more over the course of repeat viewings, but my initial impression was that it wasn’t quite as awesome as X and Pearl were. The story wasn’t as strong; it seemed a bit scattered, not as focused. West did do an excellent job capturing that sleazy ‘80s Hollywood vibe, and the movie has a great look to it, so it might be worth watching again and again just to soak in that atmosphere.

And even though I felt MaXXXine was weaker than its predecessors, that doesn’t mean I want to see West walk away from this franchise. I would gladly watch a fourth movie in the series – ideally one that takes us back to something Pearl did in the years between 1918 and 1979.