comes straight to the point. Today, let’s talk about the recently launched a24 popular horror film - "Maxine" .
This film belongs to the same series as "x" "Pearl" . The heroines are both played by Mia Goss (one person plays multiple roles). After the first two films were well-received and gained box office success at a very low cost, the third film naturally arrived as expected.
However, strictly speaking, the timeline of the trilogy is not sequential. "Pearl" is regarded as the prequel of "X", and "Maxine" is the postquel of "X", so in order to clarify the plot, let's first Let’s briefly review the first two parts.
In the first "x", the story took place in the 1980s, and the heroine Maxine was an adult film actress.
She has always had the dream of becoming a superstar, but she has no choice but to make love action movies. Even in this industry, she is not considered top-notch.
One day, she and a few friends went to a house in the wilderness to shoot a film, and unexpectedly met a crazy old lady who looked somewhat similar to herself.
The old lady was actually a solitary murderer. When she found out that outsiders were coming to her door, she started a bloody massacre without hesitation, killing these young people one by one with a knife.
Only Maxine successfully survived and escaped from the nightmare place.
But she also seems to be cursed. The old lady once looked at her with a deep look and said, "You are not special, you will eventually become like me, and everything about you will be taken away."
The second part is called "Pearl", and it tells This is the story of this old killer woman when she was young, and how she became what she is today.
It turns out that when she was young, Pearl, like Maxine, had a dream of becoming a star.
She has lived in a twisted family since she was a child. The conservative town and extremely controlling parents made her extremely tired of the local life, and she pinned her hopes on leaving her hometown.
However, even though she devoted all her efforts to her dream of becoming an actress, she still failed in the audition.
Her lover was drafted into the army and lost contact with her. She had to face her paralyzed father, her mother who could not communicate, and do countless farm work every day. The days seemed to end at a glance.
She has always believed that she is special and can live a different life. When this belief completely collapsed and she saw no way out, a serial killer who lost her mind was born.
Looking at the first two films, if the first "X" was just a low-cost plasma horror film that played with the senses and captured a group of audiences with its excellent atmosphere creation, then "Pearl" is obviously more ambitious.
It describes in detail the development process of a murderer, vividly embodying the character's inner pain, distortion, pretentiousness, ridicule and sympathy contradiction.
It is worth mentioning that Mia Goss has always been very good at playing "crazy people", whether it is the girl P in "Nymphomaniac", Hannah who bathed with eels in "The Antidote", or "Boundless" Jia Bi, who was so excited in "Swimming Pool", always had a certain dangerous and crazy temperament in her screen image. Even if she was as calm as a virgin one second, there was no guarantee that she would draw a gun and start shooting in the next shot.
The two characters, Maxine and Pearl, are undoubtedly within her comfort zone.
However, she contributed a more layered performance than before, especially in "Pearl", where the innocence, extreme, despair, and collapse of a girl who tried to escape her fate but eventually fell into depravity were all included in every scene. Killing without distractions.
’s smiling scene throughout the film’s closing credits gave her the title of “Scream Queen” of the new generation of horror films.
It can be said that her performance complements the success of this trilogy.
The newly released third film "Maxine" is another attempt at "a-level creative B-level movie" to use the lines of the characters in the film.
This film is set 5 years after "x".
At this time, because Maxine survived the massacre, she strengthened her belief that "if you survive a catastrophe, you will be blessed later".
She moved to Los Angeles and actively participated in various auditions, hoping to enter Hollywood and get a real role instead of just starring in adult films her whole life.
Because of her sharp audition performance, a female director spotted her and invited her to star in a horror film. The director
told her that he attached great importance to this work, and its theme was to declare war on the conservative Puritans. Due to the explicit subject matter, there have been protests and marches to obstruct the filming. When
chose the female protagonist as the protagonist, the producer objected, believing that inviting adult film actors to star would only make the film more controversial.
However, the director retained the heroine and said that he would not be wrong. As long as Maxine can devote herself to this role, the film will be a great success and she will use this to change her destiny.
When she meets Bole, Maxine seems to be one step closer to the life she dreams of.
But at the same time, a serial murder case caused panic throughout Hollywood. A killer named "Nightcrawler" seems to be specifically hunting young female stars.
Maxine's friends encounter accidents one after another, and she also receives an anonymous courier containing a video she shot in Pearl's cabin;
A private detective finds her and invites her to a private house party on behalf of her employer. Maxine I wanted to refuse, but I was pestered all the way...
Judging from various signs, the mysterious owner of the private house is the "Night Walker". Not only did he know Maxine inside and out, he seemed to be here for her.
The police handling the case also discovered this in time.
They found Maxine, hoping that she could help handle the case and save other girls from persecution, but Maxine chose to turn around and leave, saying "They should find ways to save themselves, like me."
What she called "Self-rescue" refers to working hard to resist fate and firmly locking the initiative in life in one's own hands. If encountering obstacles, one will block and kill the other. When bullied, one will use violence to fight violence. There are two explosive scenes in the
film, which well reflect the logic of her behavior.
When rumors spread that one was a "Night Walker", Maxine walked home at night and was followed by a man with evil intentions. The two walked to a dark alley, and the man took out a knife and wanted to steal money and sex.
But he didn't expect that Maxine, who had seen big scenes, developed the habit of carrying a gun with her.
Then the offensive was reversed. Maxine first humiliated him with a gun, and then forced him to take off his clothes and lie on the ground, and then stepped on his balls... and completed what she wanted to do with violence.
Another plot is to solve the private detective who harassed her.
When Maxine discovered that the other party was following her, she ran away and stabbed the person's face with a keychain until her face was bloody and bloody.
But the other party didn’t give up and wanted to film her pornographically. So she teamed up with her agent to knock the person unconscious and tie him in a car, and let a hydraulic press crush the person and the car into meat patties.
It can be said that these unexpected violent scenes support the evil nature of "Maxine" as a B-level movie. Compared with it, the main line "Nightcrawler" is more like a boring background.
At the end of the film, Maxine decided to go to the banquet directly to see what kind of killer this unknown killer was.
did not expect that in the empty room at the party, there was a video of her childhood.
The instigator turned out to be her father.
In American society at that time, ultra-conservative and ultra-liberal forces were colliding fiercely. Her father belonged to the conservative side. He believed that Hollywood used movies, television and other media to inject toxic ideas into the minds of young people and take away their his daughter.
For this reason, he did not hesitate to create a cult-like organization, claiming to be the savior, and used killing to save the souls of young people... Ironically, Maxine killed him with her own hands.
This scene was caught by the police who rushed to the scene, which also added another dimension to Maxine's legendary experience.
She successfully starred in the movie and became the superstar of her dreams.
You can say that she is not a good person, but you cannot deny that she is a cruel person. The story of the
trilogy ends here. The ending of the film is fixed on a beheaded dummy prop, staring at the audience expressionlessly, which reminds people of the sentence that Maxine repeated to the camera in her childhood in the video:
"I will never accept a life of compromise."
