A sadly short theme week of Female Led Horror comes to a close with the final movie in the Ti West X trilogy. I’m glad to be going back to focusing on final girl Maxine after the look back at the killer Pearl from last week. It’s definitely interesting to see where a horror sequel goes when it follows the survivor instead of the killer. It’s easy to throw some new victims at an established slasher but having a victorious final girl then have to deal with an entirely different horror situation is both very funny and kind of tragic at the same time.

The year is 1985 and it’s been six years since the events of the first movie. Maxine is now in Hollywood still doing porn and still dreaming of making it big as a real movie star. The first step in that process comes when she manages to land the lead in a horror movie sequel (how delightfully meta). However, behind the scenes, someone sinister is stalking her and those closest to her, leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them and they seem to know about what happened before. Maxine now needs to find a way to deal with pain of her past, confront the threat that looms over her in the present, and make it to set so she can secure the future she has always dreamed of.

Right out of the gate, the movie feels like it gets back to where it should be after having watched Pearl the other day. It starts with Maxine auditioning for the horror movie role and immediately gets to showcase both Mia Goth’s talent as an actress and Maxine’s unresolved trauma from the first film. It’s such a perfect establishing scene to bring you back into that world. It also then immediately transitions into the montage of “This is 1985 in LA” which does a thing that both this and X did wonderfully, which is give you an early media fake out for what the killer would be. In X, it’s the pervasive religious television show that makes you think it will be a religious anti-porn type thing behind the killing that ends up being a fake out. Here, it’s the very real Night Stalker killer that was in LA at the time that gets dangled as maybe being what the threat is.

The story in this one isn’t quite as tight as X but then it has to deal with both the fallout from that movie and the new aspects introduced here. I will say that one of the things that all three movies in this trilogy do exceptionally well is make the side characters interesting. Everybody gets a little bit of business even if they’re just on screen for a little while without it feeling forced or needing to give them a plot of their own. The movie also does a good job of making Maxine feel badass while still being believable and dealing with her survivor’s guilt and trauma. Weirdly, much as I absolutely love Kevin Bacon in this, he feels weirdly out of place? Maybe just me but it almost feels like his character walked in from an entirely different movie and just hung around. Like, it doesn’t actively hurt the movie and he is good in it; his character doesn’t quite fit, though.

In all, a good conclusion to the trilogy and these movies have made me both want to see more of Ti West and Mia Goth now.

Score: 4 out of 5