“One goddamn fucked up horror picture.”
Nice! I’ve had a big soft spot for Ti West since the House of the Devil. Even enjoyed In a Valley of Violence. I’m game for whatever genre exercise he wants to throw down, especially nasty horror.
Yeah it actually looks kinda fun to me too. I’m in.
I realized something watching X, and that is that I’m not a Ti West fan.
I was a Ti West fan when I stumbled across one of his first movies, an indie project no one has ever seen called Trigger Man. It’s “sniper horror”, a movie in which the unseen killer has a high-powered rifle. My favorites in this subgenre are King of the Mountain (directed by George Gallego-Lopez) and The Wall (directed by Doug Liman), but Trigger Man predated both of these.
From here, I watched House of the Devil, and this is where I got the idea that Ti West is a genius horror director. But would it have worked without Jocelin Donahue’s openness and vulnerability? Because I wonder if that’s what I was mostly responding to in that movie? Yeah, it’s weird and eerie, but how much of its success is because of the cast, especially when it’s your first time seeing actors like Donahue, Greta Gerwig, and AJ Bowen? Not to mention stalwarts like Dee Wallace Stone, Tom Noonan, and Mary Woronov along for the ride. House of the Devil is a masterwork, but how much is the direction and how much is the cast? I don’t know, but I’ve been wondering lately.
So then the putative Ti West fan gets a string of bad movies: a Cabin Fever sequel, The Innkeepers, In The Valley of Violence, and a ton of TV shows. (The Sacrament is an exception, but again, I will happily credit that movie’s effectiveness to Gene Jones.)
Which brings me to X, which I’ve been waiting eagerly to watch. I’ve only recently come to appreciate the progenitor of 70s horror, so you’d think X would be right up my alley. It’s clear from the get-go that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is Ti West’s starting point (the best thing I can say about X is that I really like the opening shot).
But rather than having any insight into that kind of horror, Ti West spends the first hour of X establishing his bona fides. But it’s all production design and lingering shots where the actors are holding their 70s beer cans in the frame. There’s even a blatantly obvious CG shot of Houston that looks like something from a video game. The dialogue is all super obvious stuff in which the character tells us who they are. For 70s authenticity, they say things like, “Mosey over there and grab me some Wonder bread, woman!” Because nothing says the 70s like beer cans with pull tabs and Wonder bread.
And this is what happens in X for about an hour. Also some really light porn. It’s not even porn. It’s topless shots of Mia Goth and Brittney Snow pretending to have sex. When it comes time for the repressed character to finally let loose, the movie gets all shy and just skips that part because I’m sure we can imagine it just fine, and besides, we’ve already had four breasts, so six would just be excessive.
For a movie supposedly using 70s porn as a springboard, it doesn’t really seem interested in 70s porn any more than it’s interested in the actual 70s. It seems like it just wanted to get its actresses shirts off. And then once it’s done that, a random killer appears and starts killing them. Is the killing because they’re shooting porn? Nope. Just a killer doing his killer stuff. Totally 100% random. Wrong place, wrong time. What are you gonna do?
And that’s the movie. An hour of non-porn porn, then about a half hour of a random killer doing killer stuff.
The kills themselves are a strange mix of elaborately staged and lazy. Take the very first kill. It’s supposed to be a bloodbath in the headlights of a van, and over the course of the murder, the lighting turns red as the headlights are sprayed with blood. It’s a decent enough idea, stylized like some Italian giallo movie, with the killer played by someone willing to bring unique physicality to the scene (i.e. dancing in the victim’s blood). Any director with a sense of craft should have made a horrific scene with these ingredients. And that’s what Ti West tries to do.
But there’s a supreme laziness to the staging and blocking of the scene. For instance, this is one of those movies that relies on CG gore. And the problem with CG is that it doesn’t exist on set, so unless you’re a director who knows how to integrate CG and live action, you’re going to have stabbing victims look like they’re made out of pudding. The knife slips in and out, easy as you please, as if it weren’t even there.
So what should be an iconic kill in X is instead an absurd exercise in a 90-pound old woman* with a butter knife savaging a fit 30-year-old actor who never even raises his hands to interfere with the stabbing because he knows it’s all going to be done in post. It’s all fake gore and zero sense of violence, because there’s no meaningful physicality to the action. An actor just stands there and waits for the visual effects studio to make him look murdered.
The rest of the kills are similarly lazy or ineffectual. There are a few kills that aren’t even shown, as if the movie didn’t have the budget for it. A shotgun kill, for instance. Why would you luxuriate in a kill with a butter knife, but then cut away immediately after a shotgun blast?
And this is how X spends its last half hour, after it’s first hour of tryharding its way into the 1970s. This is Ti West’s obvious and disappointing nod to 70s horror. And this is where I think I finally realized that I’m not actually a Ti West fan. It seems You’re Next had the right idea…
-Tom
* One of the movie’s biggest plot points is that this woman is unable to handle the kick of a shotgun.
No love for the alligator?
See, the alligator just made me mad. We get that awesome drone shot of the alligator swimming up behind Mia Goth and for what? To set up that you can kill people here by simply pushing them in the water?
So dumb.
And if you’re going to do a gory alligator kill with arguably your most famous actress, do you really just want it to be someone splashing around in the water with red food coloring? I mean, yeah, that was horrific in Jaws in 1975, but there have been about fifty years of filmmaking since then. Did Ti West not see The Revenant or even Deep Blue Sea?
Did I mention that I really didn’t like X?
-Tom
Watched this last night and yep. Once again, a visually talented director (probably mostly the DP though) who makes a movie that wanders around and doesn’t go anywhere: Shyamalan, Del Toro, and West. There might actually have been something interesting to say here about the genesis of both porn and horror in the 70’s, but the movie doesn’t say it. What’s the message of the film? Getting old is tragic? Old people are gross?
What was the point of Jenna Ortega getting in on the action? That was a plot point that went absolutely nowhere. What was the point of having Mia Goth play the old woman? What was the point of the reveal at the very end about the preacher being her dad?
The movie wasn’t even scary! Not even a little bit!
Surprise!
So I also thought X was pretty dumb, but I’m slightly more interested in this prequel, if only because I really do like Mia Goth and it seems like this will be giving her a pretty big canvas to be nutty. I expect to be disappointed though.
Good for Ti West, I guess.
Boy, I’m amazed at how much franchise they’re trying to get out of this one (fairly thin) movie. That’s two sequels announced in the same year!
Y’all think too much. ‘X’ was a fun homage to 70’s slasher flicks and ‘Pearl’ was an unsettling origin story. Mia Goth was great in both movies.
Okay, against my better judgement, I sprang for Pearl. And…
…holy cats, I’m back to being a Ti West fan! Well, maybe a Mia Goth fan. Really, it took both of them to make Pearl work. I feel like @DrCrypt nailed it before even seeing it:
What surprised me most is that Ti West didn’t just get out of the way to let Goth goof off and play – that’s a big part of why Pearl works! Just ask the scarecrow! – but he actually had some nice touches in here, mostly due to it being a period piece. But, yeah, this is the guy who basically built House of the Devil around Jocelin Donahue, now building Pearl around Mia Goth. It’s no House of the Devil, but I liked it more than any of West’s non-House of the Devil movies. And I liked it just fine as a standalone movie. In fact, it might have made me hate X a little less?
Nah, that’s crazy talk! But it’s nice to be a Ti West fan again.
I’m hearing good things about Pearl, but not so much about X. Does it lose much to skip X and go straight to Pearl?
Chronologically, that’s actually the correct viewing order! Pearl is a prequel to X. You won’t mess anything up by watching the prequel first, or even just instead.
In fact, I’d say knowing the events in Pearl would actually make X feel a little less haphazard. I still think X is a weaker movie and yet another example of someone who didn’t “get” Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s slightly more interesting if you watch Pearl first to lay some groundwork.
I watched this last night as I’m on a trial of Showtime on Prime (because of Everything etc.) and man, I thought I was in for something special from the first 1/3, but the next 2/3 was just bleh. Gimme whoever directed Midsommer with this plot and you’ve got gold.
I saw this last weekend when I had free trials of a bunch of premium channels. Thought it was ok but nothing special. I also thought the same about Barbarian though, which people seem to be raving about so maybe I’m simply out of touch.
We loved the first half of Barbarian…and then bleh.