X (

2022

)

I complained in my review of Barbarian (2022), that modern horror films feel utterly bereft of even the hint of playful sexuality, to the point where we can't even have the two leads get to first base. I'm not out here demanding every film have the same amount of nudity as The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), The Return of the Living Dead (1985), or Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) but there should at least be some ember of carnality. I'm tired of modern horror movies that are more prudish than sixty-year-old Gothics; at least Black Sunday (1960) had a nude portrait of the lead actress in the background of one shot. Hell, if modern horror is any indication of the sex drives of adolescents, then we had better brace ourselves for a population crash. I understand that Zoomers are getting a reputation as a bunch of sex-negative moral scolds but I had assumed that was just the result of a vocal minority. If there's not even a market for sleazy horror films then the generation is worse off than I thought. Oh well, at least today's film proves that there are a few filmmakers left in Hollywood who are willing to put butts on the screen in an attempt to put butts in theater seats. Though it is a bit concerning that the filmmakers couldn't manage to coax the only actual zoomer in the cast into anything more salacious than a five-second shot of her in her underwear, and that they can only put in free-wheeling sexuality and sleaze into a period piece about the late 1970s.

Nostalgic period pieces have become a blight on the industry. Sure, they may have existed in some form or another for decades, but when limited to wistful coming-of-age stories like American Graffiti (1973), The Outsiders (1983), and Stand by Me (1986), they were at least tolerable. Yet in the past decade and a half, they have grown, like a cancer until practically every non-Marvel blockbuster is some kind of callback, reboot, or reimagining. With few exceptions, these films are driven by a crass desire to cash in on nostalgia rather than a desire to say anything interesting about the period they are aping. This is not to blame the audiences rushing out to see Top Gun: Maverick (2022) or Super 8 (2011). If all you were fed for years was a thin gruel seasoned only with the chef's spit, you would be pretty enthusiastic for anything that reminded you of the time, long ago, when you would get five-course meals. Indeed, the quality of the average blockbuster has slipped so much since the 1980s that even the most undiscerning audiences are beginning to realize what is going on.

To X's credit, it has chosen a different period than everyone else, if only by a couple of years. Rather than set its films in the middle of Regan's America, it goes a few years earlier to the last days of the 1970s. Likewise, a lot more effort has gone into creating the illusion of 1979 than just a title card and a few golden oldies on the radio. Indeed, the film renders nearly all the little details of the epoch, the clothing, hairstyles, and makeup, just right. It's certainly a more impressive rendering of the late 1970s than recent offerings like Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021).

There's also an aspect of the setting and the world of 1979 that is critical to the film's plot: The recent creation and popularization of consumer-grade video recorders, which opens up possibilities both for consumers looking to watch movies at home and amateur filmmakers looking to make movies on the cheap. As it turns out, pornography would be key to both these demographics. The appeal for independent filmmakers is obvious, as sleazy exploitation and pornographic films had long been a staple for those without the financial means or political connections to worm their way into the proper film industry. For these filmmakers, anything that lowered costs was a considerable boon. However, the real revolution would happen on the consumer side. Home video players brought pornography into the home, a significant improvement over sitting in a darkened movie theater in the roughest neighborhood in town surrounded by a mob of rain-coat-wearing perverts. Hundreds of thousands of would-be coomers, who were scared off by the porno theaters of old, were more than willing to step through the sequence beads dividing the adult section of their video store from the regular area.

Porn on videotape was poised to be the next big thing when the movie opens in 1979, and across the country, there are only a few savvy businessmen who have any idea about the potential gold mine. One such visionary is Wayne Gilroy, the manager of an exotic dance club in Houston Texas, who is determined to get in on the ground floor. So he makes a partnership with RJ Nichols, an aspiring filmmaker, to produce a pornographic film called The Farmer's Daughter. Starring in said film are two of Wayne's best dancers, Maxine Minx and Bobby-Lynne, along with a black veteran with a remarkably large manhood named Jackson Hole. Helping out with all this is RJ's girlfriend Lorraine, who apparently didn't know what sort of film he boyfriend was making, and is uncomfortable surrounded by this crowd of degenerates. Since the group is on a budget, they are quickly priced out of any locations around Houston, so they pile into a van and head out into the hinterlands to rent an old farmhouse to serve as their set from ancient farmer Howard and his equally decrepit wife Pearl.

I was initially worried that the film would fall into the familiar pattern of courageous sexual deviants butting heads with the evil fundamentalist Christians, a narrative pattern that was far more acceptable when the entire mainstream media didn't run interference for school teachers turned sex pests. Fortunately, this isn't the case, as even though Pearl and Howard are constantly watching some scummy televangelist prattle on about the corruption of America, it quickly becomes apparent that they are at least as depraved as the amateur pornographers staying in their guest house, while at least Pearl is anyway. Howard is just an old fart who wants to be left alone on his property, but Pearl is a sex-fiend who gets her kicks capturing and torturing anyone unfortunate enough to wander onto the property. She even has the tortured corpse of a door-to-door salesman strung up in the basement. Howard for his part still loves his wife despite her obvious insanity and cruelty, so he runs interference for her and helps her track down and capture her victims. Pearl takes a special interest in our amateur pornographers though because they are exactly the sort most likely to draw her ire: Young, sexually unrepressed, and good-looking. All the things that she has lost over the past fifty years or so, and all the things she wishes she could have again.

X is, generally speaking, not a film that is especially shy about announcing its cinematic inspiration. The most obvious here is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It's not just the setting or rural Texas, or the time period of the 1970s, but even individual shots and moments throughout the film that seem to be tailor-made to ape the aesthetics of the classic horror film. That's all well and good, but it still seems to me to be a colossal waste of effort that could have been better spent crafting a novel look and feel for this movie that could stand on its own as a classic. Indeed, my biggest complaint about all the nostalgia wank floating around now is how much effort is being spent recreating something that already exists and how much better it could be spent fashioning a new iconography.

X's shameless mimicry of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is at least fully realized though, the film is on far shakier ground when it opts to knock off Psycho (1960) as well. Indeed, it would have been far better off if it had just confined itself to the odd visual reference like what it did with Eaten Alive (1976) and The Shining (1980). Fans and film scholars alike would see the car, half-submerged in the swamp, and know exactly the moment that X was aping, for instance. However, X makes the big mistake of having its characters talk directly about Psycho (1960), and how that movie was so clever for starting one way and then abruptly shifting genre and story without warning. A conversation that happens right before the film makes the jump from a slow-burning drama about a group of amateur pornographers filming in rural Texas, to a full-blown gore-bedecked horror film. The problem here is that X never trusted in its ability to tell a compelling story about these characters that did not end with them being brutally murdered. That is why the movie started with the local police poking through the ghastly remains of a vicious crime, and it's why there has been almost constant fake-out scares with either Pearl, Howard, or their pet alligator. There has never been a point where the audience has been in doubt about whether they are watching a horror film or not, and certainly not even a second where they may have been so engrossed in the plot and characters that they forgot the hammer that was about to drop. This is not a drama that morphs abruptly into a horror film, it's a slow-paced horror film that has all the murders in the last forty minutes.

It's not like this conversation makes any more sense if we ignore the meta-context of the film either. It's brought up by Lorraine when she announces to RJ that she doesn't want to just record the sound for the porno but to also make her acting debut in the feature. When RJ tells her there's no room in the script for another character or another sex scene (which is obviously a lie, he would just prefer not to wear the cuckold's horns), Lorraine brings up Psycho (1960) and how that movie changed midway through. Leaving aside the fact that I don't believe the girl who was uncomfortable with the very idea of pornography twelve hours earlier would be chomping at the bit to star in one after a fifteen-minute conversation, this scene still doesn't make any sense. Indeed, if anything this makes less sense than the meta explanation, as adding yet another nubile girl to the porno for Jackson to plow will not change the direction of the movie. If anything it will just add an extra twenty minutes to the runtime while keeping the plot, setting, and characters completely intact. It's a completely nonsensical thing for her to say, and it doesn't even make sense as a meta-commentary on the rest of the film.

When I call a film pretentious, this is the exact sort of thing that I am referring to. The idea of a movie that begins in one way and then shifts drastically to a different genre and story, perhaps even focusing on entirely different characters and events is an interesting idea. Sure, it's not exactly innovative as every two-bit thriller has been ripping-off Psycho (1960) for the better part of a century at this point, but it is still an idea that has some legs to it. X has enough sense to recognize that, and enough ambition to aspire to implement the trope, but it is only able to clumsily grasp at it in the most surface-level way imaginable. It cannot actually work this idea into its script, and when trying to have its characters draw attention to it they can only utter absolute nonsense.

After this debacle, X could count on precious little goodwill on my part as it entered into its third act/blood bath. This is a shame because it's mostly well-realized. The gore is suitably grotesque, with the two ancient killers employing a variety of weapons and means to slaughter the hapless young pornographers. Sure, the extreme age of both Pearl and Howard (in their rubber prosthetics they look like they're 120 years old) makes the whole thing a bit hard to swallow. Most septuagenarians (and we are being extremely generous assuming they are only 79 years old), have trouble making it up and down a flight of stairs quickly. Hunting down a collection of hale and healthy 30-year-olds should be well beyond them, especially when we saw Howard struggle to walk across a field earlier. Still, the only part that strains credulity beyond breaking is when Howard locks Lorraine up in the basement, unwatched and unrestrained. The problem here is the basement is loaded with tools and other impromptu weapons. There is very little stopping her from breaking free and turning the tables on her captors, and indeed only an extreme stroke of bad luck stops her. Howard happens to be in the house when she busts through the door, a fact that is just a little too convenient when the geezer has been wandering around the property for the last half hour.

In the end, only Maxine manages to escape the rampaging retirees, and she makes the interesting decision to just book it without even trying to help the local authorities. Hell, it's not even clear that she even bothered to tell them about the massacre or if the cops only got called when the neighbors started to smell the corpses putrefying in the sun. At this point, some audience members, myself among them, might begin to wonder if perhaps the coke-sniffing whore they've been rooting for, for the last two hours might not be the noblest figure. We're kept at arm's length from Maxine, with her remaining a mostly blank slate beyond her desire to be a star, and on reflection, it's quite possible that there's something sinister percolating below the surface. She certainly didn't hesitate to kill when pushed, and she doesn't seem especially troubled by the sight of a half dozen homicides, he friends and lovers among them.

It reminds me a bit of the Suspiria (2018) remake, and not just because the same actress is playing both Pearl and Maxine. There is no moral dimension to the conflict between Pearl and the pornographers. Sure, Maxine isn't a crazy old hag bent on slaughtering every nubile tourist she encounters, but what exactly differentiates her from Pearl? As near as I can see it's just a couple of decades, and when her youth and beauty fade, she could easily vent her frustrations on youth in much the same way. Maybe director Ti West, having plumbed Pearl's origin story in Pearl (2022), will follow up X with a sequel about Maxine as a homicidal old witch in the modern day. He could call it NC-17.