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Something Psycho-ish is going on in MaXXXine (2024)

posted 23 days ago by swanstep (2619)
2 replies | jump to latest

Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uS3t6nFgY
The Bates Motel and Psycho House (or at least their sets on the Universal Studios tour) show up 1 minute in.

What's MaXXXine you say? It's the third collab between star Mia Goth and director Ti West (of whom I first became aware as one of the 'Trailers from Hell' Guys). It continues a character, the titular Maxine, begun in their rather good meta-slasher X. Their second movie together, the truly excellent Pearl, provided a prequel/backstory for a second character Mia Goth virtuosically (I didn't even recognize it was her first time through) played in X, whereas Maxxine picks up with Mia Goth's final girl-ish main X character now in '80s LA. I'm really looking forward to this! West and Goth have one of the great director-actress (both write) collabs going.

Update: This is also an honest-to-God horror trilogy which is very rare and maybe even unprecedented. Argento's work after Suspiria sometimes gets grouped with it into 'the three mothers' trilogy, but the connective tissue is pretty weak in my view, and other alleged groupings such as Haneke's 'emotional glaciation' trilogy of 7th Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments - all currently on youtube as it happens - again has little actual narrative connective tissue and is mainly an intellectual and marketing gesture in my view. The Red Riding Trilogy - see Ebert's review of it here:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/red-riding-trilogy-2010
- might be the only *real* precedent and competitor for quality.

[–] roger1 (2351) 19 days ago

Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uS3t6nFgY
The Bates Motel and Psycho House (or at least their sets on the Universal Studios tour) show up 1 minute in.

--

Yep...there they are...making a nice guest appearance in a 2024 franchise horror picture and reminding us that Psycho STILL has a role in horror history even as it seems that Halloween, Exorcist and Alien franchises have pretty much overrun it.

And I guess they are supposed to be the movie SETS from Psycho and in a Hollywood setting?

Looking at the two famous buildings in this trailer , I was reminded that while their COMPOSITION(as Hitchcock told Truffaut, "the vertical house and the horizontal motel" are as compelling as ever, without the atmosphere and the context of the 1960 movie...they are rather without their scary souls.

On point, I had reason to watch two Psycho related pieces in the last few weeks:

On Prime Video, if you click on "Psycho Trailer" to rent the movie , you don't get the famous old "Hitchcock gives away both murders" trailer -- you get a CLIP from the movie itself and a great one it is: those moments in the darkness and the rain and the headlights when Marion pulls off the new highway by accident, the lights fade to darkness, Herrmanns freakout strings fade away and we got the POV from the car as this looms ahead: BATES MOTEL -- VACANCY. Man that to me just might be THE moment in horror movie history, and Hitchocck at the peak of his powers MILKED the entire slow, slogging drive up the path past that sign and to the motel and then: Marion's first view of the HOUSE. A shot so historic and overpowering its like just MORE history AFTER "BATES MOTEL -- VACANCY."

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 19 days ago

I signed up for some version of Peacock, but learned that its not the version that has Hitchocck movies. But I did watch(with a companiion) the famous Alfred Hitchcock Hour "An Unlocked Window" -- starring "the Psycho house" and I was a bit disappointed to see that in THIS episode, the house wasn't framed as well as in Psycho, and the house seemed to have had a recent paint job, probably for another TV episode -- it was almost WHITE.

The Psycho house in its first reveal in Psycho versus in a few shots in "An Unlocked Window" was the difference between something profound and classic and something...rather mundane. A REAL "haunted house" versus...a backdrop.

Its like one critic wrote -- astutely -- about the first appearance of the Bates House in Psycho II -- "The Bates House looks like the Universal Tour Tram will be pulling up in just a few minutes."

As for MAXXINE and the trilogy that began with X -- I am aware ot them all and they seem to have struck a nerve. The first one was set in the 70's -- yes? -- and used a Texas Chainsaw Massacre isolation to frame some young peolpe making a porn movie(Hence X) with permission of the old couple who own the house in which they are going to film it. My understanding is that not only do the really old people resent the young'uns from filming sex on their property -- they are a bit jealous of the youth they have lost. Horror ensues. Old lady killer horror. Psycho horror. (And, from what I've read, a straght ahead sex scene for the VERY old couple that asks us -- is THAT horror, or should passion last as long as you have the partner for it?)

I might just catch up with these X movies. They seem to have a thought in their head. Though I'm pretty much burned out on gory kills by bladed instruments. Psycho remains preseved in my head as THE start to all that. Scary enough. Me, I prefer thrillers(Charade, Mirage, Wait Until Dark, Play Misty for Me, Jaws, Marathon Man, Black Sunday, Silence of the Lambs..) to slashers.