Rated: R18+
Directed by: Ti West
Produced by: Ti West, Jacob Jaffke, Harrison Kreiss, Kevin Turen
Starring: Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi, Jenna Ortega.
‘Just when you thought you’d escaped the slaughterhouse.’
Cicadas and flies and a rundown farmhouse are the setting of, X.
Police cars have their strobes silently rotating.
They walk into the farmhouse.
An evangelist is preaching on the TV.
The cops walk down to the basement, ‘My God.’
X is a horry (ha, ha, typo I swear), I mean gory, horror featuring the cast and crew of a porn movie in the making: The Farmer’s daughters.’
It’s 1979. Anyone can make a porn, especially a home-made movie. But cameraman, RJ (Owen Campbell) wants this porn to be different, ‘Because it’s possible to make a good dirty movie.’
He’s brought his good-girl girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) along as sound tech to prove his point.
And Maxine (Mia Goth) co-star and girlfriend of the executive producer (Martin Henderson) of said porn has the x-factor: ‘I need to be famous Wayne.’
To give the setting of the film the right ambiance, Wayne rents an outbuilding on a farm. A farm owned by an elderly man and his wife.
And by elderly, I mean old; the old-factor pushed to become part of the horror, because, X is a horror that builds with flashes from the deteriorating old to the fresh and young x-factor porn stars.
Blond bombshell Brittany and fellow, well-endowed sometime boyfriend, Jackson (Scott Mescudi) are ready to perform for the first scene.
The flash back and forth between the old and the x with the ominous music of the soundtrack holds the tone of bad things to come.
Including bones sticking out of fingers and nails through feet.
There are jumps and moments when I was looking through my fingers.
It gets twisted too, but not to the extent it’s unwatchable.
The storyline wavers across to the ridiculous but there’s genuine tongue-in-cheek humour, like a sign reading, ‘Plowing Service,’ stuck to the side of the film crew’s van.
There’s nothing believable about the old couple, but the techniques in the directing and editing lift the quality of X, the juxtaposition of scenes timed just right, the staring of Maxine directly into the camera and co-star Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) asking, ‘What about you, Maxine? What’s your American Dream?’
Maxine doesn’t answer directly, only to herself in the mirror – to not live the life she doesn’t deserve.
There’s underlying meaning to the seemingly benign that comes full circle in the story that leaves a different kind of understanding of the film – not just sex, not just horror, but an extra layer that makes the erotic slasher also interesting.