X

 X  is a horror film directed by Ti West and released in 2022.  The movie is a beautifully shot and intelligently made mad-slasher picture, but it can't overcome the fundamental and misogynistic limitations of the genre.  That said, it's entertaining in a gory way and, viewed as a low-budget exploitation film, it's pretty convincing -- there's lots of sex, tits and ass, and plenty of gruesome carnage.  The movie isn't really frightening -- we know from the outset that the picture is just a hyper-violent and sexualized variation of Psycho, the grandfather of the genre, but the acting is reasonably good, although, one must hasten to say, not good enough to cause us to really care about any of the victims of killer's gruesome rampage.

Set in 1979, X involves a group of young people who travel to a remote location somewhere in southeast Texas to shoot a pornographic movie.  There's a Black ex-Vietnam vet (Marine Corps) stud, a trash-talking blonde bimbo, and a cocaine-addicted girl-next-door type together with the director, an openly avaricious young man who looks a bit like Matthew McConaughey who expects to make a fortune from the filthy "smut" that he is producing.  The crew consists of a mousy college girl (they call her "Church Mouse") and her geeky cameraman boyfriend who is convinced that he is bringing "avant garde film techniques" to the movie.  For some obscure reason, the porno movie is filmed in a sort of bunkhouse, about a hundred yards away from a big old ranchhouse where an old man and his wife live.  The old man has agreed to let the crew shoot in the bunkhouse for a fee of $30 dollars and it's not quite clear that he knows what kind of movie is being made on his premises.  Near the bunkhouse, there's a sinister-looking lagoon patrolled by a big, horrible-looking alligator.  (As Chekhov said:  "If you introduce an alligator in the first act, that alligator had better eat someone in the play's last act.")  In the ranch-house, a TV is tuned to some kind of evangelical preacher who sermonizes on the black-and-white tube in inserted shots throughout the whole movie.  After about forty minutes of establishing narrative, someone starts murdering the cast and crew of the porno film -- as is always the case with this kind of movie, the killings seem to be some kind of perverse punishment for sex and, since the film involves the production of a porno film (The Farmer's Daughter) there's lots of copulation to atone for, sex acts filmed fairly explicitly or, at least, for maximum voyeuristic impact.  The movie is witty, well-acted, and interestingly staged, until the sun goes down -- then, the picture turns into a garden variety slasher film, with increasingly brutal and bloody murders staged for the camera until the so-called "final girl", the last survivor manages to kill the monstrous slasher(s) and escape.  Everything in the last half of the movie (with the exception of maybe one killing) is devised in a way that is wholly predictable -- the writer and director of the movie, Ti West, is clearly a brilliant moviemaker, but he can't do anything with the premise and once the slasher killings begin, there's really no point to watching the rest of the movie -- it's just an unpleasant sequence of gory deaths.  (Spoilers follow.)

The murderers are the old man and woman who live in the ranch-house overlooking the ramshackle cottage where the porno film is being made.  The old man and woman are suitably unpleasant-looking, although their appearance is the result of old age and not some sort of extrinsic disfigurement.  (The film posits as its chief horror that fact that the two oldsters would want, and, indeed, attempt to, have sex.  This aspect of the film is "Ageist" and the older you are, the more unpleasant this seems.)  The influence of both Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hangs heavy over the movie.  The bunkhouse is apart from the "house of horrors" on the hill (complete with a cellar hiding a mangled corpse and rooms full of ancient, morbid-looking dolls); as in Hitchcock's classic, to which the dialogue explicitly refers, the "house of horrors" is often shot from a low angle. By contrast, the rambling bunkhouse is like the Bates' Motel, an annex to the gruesome sequences in the big Victorian mansion.  (There's also the lagoon and, as in Psycho, even, a dead man's car drowned in the water where the alligator lurks.)  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is referenced in the opening shots in which some saturnine Texas rangers explore the murder scene and make grim declarations about its horrors (like the Chainsaw Massacre's opening scene in the cemetery) and the entire situation shown by the film -- a spunky troop of amateur movie-makers collaborating to produce an indelible exploitation movie relates back to the earlier horror movie.  The movie's villains are, also, derived from the oldsters in Tobe Hooper's Chainsaw Massacre -- they're made up in the same way.  (The old woman has a nimbus of white hair that is always rim-lit and that shines with a silvery radiance; filmed from the rear, however, she looks more than a little like Norman Bates' mom.)  The young actors who are slaughtered one-by-one are fairly appealing although they're just cannon-fodder and we don't have the leisure to get to sympathize with them very much -- they're like lab rats, cute and endearing but doomed from the outset.

Although the movie is garbage, it's remarkably well-shot and effectively edited.  There are many long takes involving people moving across the somewhat desolate landscapes and the interior shots are gorgeous -- we can see the woods and meadows through the windows glowing in the magic-hour gloaming and the beds and shabby couches in the bunkhouse are warmly lit so that the naked bodies shine with an amber-colored radiance.  In one scene, a young woman sheds her clothing to swim at twilight in the lagoon (not aware that she's sharing the water with a twelve-foot gator).  In a close-up, we see the pond water rippling around her face reflecting a hundred different colors.  Before the film becomes pointless, the young woman recording sound becomes fascinated with the sex scenes and decides she wants to participate as well.  Her boyfriend, the camera-man is hypocritically appalled. The director expansively says:  "No, no, the camera changes everything," and the blonde Houston call-girl notes that people need to make a distinction between love and sex.  All of this dialogue is pointed and well-written.  It's too bad that when the killings begin, the movie has no place to go.