'MaXXXine' Is Cheap-Chic Horror At Its Finest

Writer-director Ti West’s new film is a scrappy, gory reflection of '80s Hollywood — and a low-key nod to 'Pretty Woman.'

In the opening scenes of 1990’s “Pretty Woman,” Julia Roberts’ character Vivian Ward, a sex worker in Hollywood, rehabs well-worn black thigh-high leather boots with nothing but a safety pin and a magic marker, pairing them with a blue-and-white spandex cutout dress and a short blonde wig. It’s resourceful, hot and altogether looks like it totals about $11.95.

While “Pretty Woman” is a quintessential ’90s movie, it reflects a fading 1989, the year it was filmed — down to the cheap, Rodeo Drive-adjacent sleaze, the just-out-of-reach dreams and the dead woman’s body in a dumpster that smiling tourists can’t stop snapping photos of.

And, most interestingly — within its first 30 minutes, even — it scrubs off the grime of the ’80s to morph into a “Cinderella”-esque romcom classic that helped usher in a cleaner, more gentrified ’90s era. (Coincidentally, “Pretty Woman” was conceived as a much darker crime drama before it became what it did).

It’s fascinating to think about that movie alongside “MaXXXine,” writer-director Ti West’s dazzling, 1985-set Hollywood horror threequel so entrenched in the filth of that time that it’s hard to imagine how anyone then could have fathomed a way out of it.

The camera trails Maxine Minx (the superb Mia Goth), a sex worker and wannabe movie star, as she swaggers down some of the same streets Vivian does in similarly tacky-chic clothes, giving audiences an unflinching look at Hollywood in the mid-’80s. In a dizzying blur, we see X-rated video stores; seedy alleys; run-down establishments and graffiti galore.