Director: Ti West
Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: I can’t say that I found the first two-thirds of the film—you know, the part that would have functioned perfectly well as any of a number of softcore porno films airing on premium cable in the 90s—more than mostly boring. I usually find prolonged depictions of sex pretty boring, and it isn’t even remotely like the film has anything even remotely as fresh to say about pornographers as Boogie Nights (1997), or even anything as introspective about strippers as Showgirls (1995). The only even remotely profound things it has to say about sex are focused on the insistent grossness of its villains, which lends the film an ugly quality beyond its violence.
If that was all the film had to offer, then it would have been a pretty depressing experience, especially considering that the film comes pre-packaged as a franchise which could run for years, with an entire prequel imminent, Pearl, which had been shot concurrently with this film and another sequel on the drawing board.
So, how did the film win me over? First, the entire movie—for all of its flaws in tone—feels thoroughly as if it was produced in the time in which it takes place, the late 1970s. There’s never one moment when I could see the 2020s leaking through the film, and that is an impressive enough trick in its own right. When the film really gets going, it very nearly feels as if it was a long-lost slasher movie of the era, only turned up recently.
Which brings me to the film’s ending. Slasher absurdism abounds and ugliness in a number of forms pervades. This alone would limit the film to reaching only for the mediocre, especially when it is abundantly clear that it is slavishly devoted to being an homage of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). But that the film could tag the proceedings with a joke that proceeds somewhat logically from what preceded it, turns the entire thing into a comedic Rube Goldberg machine, and it’s hard not to like that.