Summer horror blowout (part 2): Maxxxine, Longlegs, and cuckoo

On paper, Ti West’s “X” trilogy is a fascinating venture - an interconnected trio of horror films, each of which pays deliberate homage to a different stylistic era. But West remains a solid conceptual filmmaker who rarely backs it up with actual ideas or inspiration. X was basically a porn-themed riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - and 70s grindhouse horror in general… the end result intermittently fun but largely unadventurous. Prequel Pearl offered more surface intrigue as a Technicolor subversion of a Douglas Sirk period melodrama, but proved rather hollow outside of the marvelous platform it provided West’s muse/star/co-creative Mia Goth. Now - with concluding entry MaXXXine - the series jumps into the seedy underbelly of 1980s Los Angeles… and its giallo-tinted, 80s-pop-scored fervor initially feels like catnip. The opening of the film, in which adult film star Maxine Minx (Goth) nails her audition for a mainstream horror sequel and struts across the studio backlot to ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’ as the opening credits unfold, is the single headiest dopamine hit of the year-to-date. It’s pure cinematic candy. And with the Night Stalker on the loose, a scuzzbucket PI (Kevin Bacon, stinking up the theater with sweat and cheap cologne) lurking in the shadows, the body count rising, a pair of detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) asking pointed questions, and Maxine’s dreams of Hollywood stardom being threatened by her past, it very much feels like Ti West has finally gotten his narrative ducks in a row.​

Unfortunately, once West reveals where the story is headed, it all goes rather limp - not unlike the would-be rapist Maxine cathartically curb-stomps early on (the film’s creative stuntedness is perhaps best exemplified by the fact West is given the enviable opportunity to play with the Bates Motel on the Universal backlot… and basically comes up with zilch). Goth remains deeply committed to the cause, and her performance across all three films should cement her place as a neo horror icon. But she gets hung out to dry during the climax. Because the series was essentially conceived on the fly (West began writing Pearl while filming X and was inspired to take the project straight into production), the overarching commentary on fame and stardom feels haphazard - there’s no true connective tissue in terms of why Pearl’s failure ultimately becomes Maxine’s triumph. Maxine is hellbent on becoming a star… but when it comes time for the claws to come out, they remain frustratingly sheathed. For a movie that acts as if it were forged in the crucible of 80s B-movie sleaze, MaXXXine offers a tepid denouement that barely lives up to the sordid promise of a single X - let alone three.

“Peculiar” is probably the most apt description when it comes to Longlegs and its impressively muscular performance at the box office (it’s no stretch to call it the most significant indie horror breakout hit in years). The new Oz Perkins film is not particularly accessible, nor is it all that much fun. It’s obliquely mean-spirited, a nihilistic horror-thriller whose nastiness is only somewhat mitigated by a healthy streak of kook DNA. Maika Monroe (quietly making a case as the best horror starlet in the business at the moment) stars as fledgling FBI agent Lee Harker, whose clairvoyant potential gets her assigned to the “Longlegs” case… a serial killer responsible for a string of familial murder-suicides dating back decades, who leaves cryptic letters at the crime scenes packed with Satanic coding. To an extent, Perkins wants to have his cake and eat it too… he stages the film as a grounded procedural in a similar vein to the work of Thomas Harris, which makes it all the more jarring when the story zags into legitimately looney occult territory and just keeps going. The approach doesn’t necessarily serve Monroe - in spite of the increasingly harrowed tenor of her performance, she’s given frustratingly little agency in an investigative sense (either from a practical or a paranormal perspective) - no matter how many breathless comparisons people attempt to draw with Clarice Starling (clearly the template Perkins was working from). This isn’t incidental, admittedly - it’s all part of the plot’s cruel jape, which crystalizes in the third act… but feels dramatically limiting all the same.  ​

It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that the titular villain is played by Nicolas Cage and one’s tolerance for the inherent campiness of his performance will definitely vary. The fact Cage is being hailed as a revelation is a puzzler; as a performer, he’s never been shy about indulging his inner-freak. With his pale, puffy visage and simpering, high-pitched voice, he’s wholly committed… but there’s also something a bit arbitrary about his choices, as if they’re informed by random whimsy more than anything (it’s not unlike Johnny Depp’s increasingly diminished collaborations with Tim Burton, who began to let him operate virtually unchecked). For all that, Longlegs still manages to strike a nerve. It permeates the skin and lingers there, slightly necrotic. Perkins doesn’t really sweat the wonky internal logic too much - his is a movie that’s more about basking in its own elliptically bleak vibes (Alicia Witt, long removed from her own teen horror days, makes an indelible impression as Lee’s religious-minded mother, clinging to her faith in what feels like a punishingly Godless world). One wishes Perkins were a little more disciplined in his approach; the storytelling can be casually sloppy. But Longlegs, oddly enough, feels like a movie that may get its hooks in deeper with repeat viewings. Only time will tell.

Cuckoo offers truth in advertising, because German director Tilman Singer’s sophomore feature is definitely horror moviemaking at its most rapturously bonkers. Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer stars as Gretchen, a teenager forced to join her semi-estranged father (Martin Csokas), indifferent stepmother (Jessica Henwick, disappointingly wasted), and her mute half-sister in the Bavarian Alps following her mother’s death. They arrive at a resort overseen by the enigmatic Herr König (Dan Stevens), where Gretchen takes a part-time job at the front desk and soon finds herself privy to bizarre happenings… such as vomiting guests, a mysterious hooded woman who lurks in the neighboring woods like some nightmarish, bled-together blend of De Palma and Cronenberg and Nicolas Roeg, and both seizures and apparent time loops induced by some sort of reverberating shriek. Revealing how all this knits together would, of course, be criminal… suffice it to say, the movie takes some big and seriously whacky creative swings. Who says there are no new ideas? ​

The talented Schafer feels destined to blaze a trail as a trans actress who isn’t restricted to playing trans characters. It’s a testament to her fearlessness - and Singer’s warped sense of humor - that she spends the majority of the film looking as if she ran smack into a brick wall…her face heavily bandaged and swollen like a catcher’s mitt. The lack of vanity (particularly for her first starring role) is delightfully refreshing. Stevens, meanwhile, continues to burnish his reputation as one of our most fiendishly warped character actors - it’s hard to remember when he was best known as the appreciably vanilla Cousin Matthew on Downton Abbey (or when his exit from the show felt like such an ill-advised betrayal). Between this film and Abigail (and, to a lesser extent, Godzilla x Kong), he’s already left an ineffaceable mark on 2024 (and given his accent kit a full-blown workout). One can argue that Cuckoo doesn’t entirely work - in fact, its script has a messy, staple gunned-together quality - yet it hardly matters when a film establishes a wavelength this weird, creepy, yet darkly funny. Singer (who showed initial promise with his 2018 debut Luz) demonstrates a bananas sense of showmanship during the climax… he juggles so many balls, more than a few are fumbled and hit the ground, but the sheer audacity is worth applauding all the same.