- Title: X
- IMDb: link
Set in 1979, writer/director Ti West‘s X stars Mia Goth in dual roles as a stripper who heads off with friends to a Texas farmhouse to make a porn and also as the elderly resident of the home who goes on a sexually-frustrated murderous rampage as she begins picking off the visitors one at a time with the help of her equally bat-shit crazy husband (Stephen Ure).
The psycho-biddy thriller with strong exploitation vibes playing on the dichotomy of the young porn starlets fighting for their lives against the elderly killers was a hit with both critics and audiences. The malevolent Pearl and her husband are murderous psychopaths without hope of redemption. However, the film also doesn’t shy away from allowing them to be vulnerable with each other producing one of the most memorable scenes of a character hiding under a bed during sex in the history of cinema. As for our heroine, she’s a far cry from the cliched slasher flick virgin.
Our smut peddlers are Goth as Maxine Minx (a role she would reprise in MaXXXine) and her boyfriend (Martin Henderson) along with would-be pornstars Brittany Snow and Kid Cudi. West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett play with the look of the film shooting the porn footage at a different aspect ratio to mimic the filming of the time. Along for the ride are an amateur filmmaker (Owen Campbell) and his naive girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) who turns out to be more curious about becoming part of The Farmer’s Daughters than he would like.
The film would be in the inspiration for a prequel, Pearl, which West began working on during the COVID production delays for X focusing on an origin story for Pearl set decades before. Goth would return to reprise the role of a young Pearl and then, completing the trilogy, would return once more to the role of Maxine in MaXXXine with each of the three films diving into different aspects and subgenres of horror. Of the trilogy, the barebones X (made for only a fraction of the price of the other two movies) remains the most successful as a straightforward, yet quite memorable, horror flick.
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