On a remote Texas farm somewhere outside of Houston, a young woman unhooks her overalls and slips into a pond from a battered wooden dock. She floats on the surface looking up at the sky in a moment of peaceful calm. Unbeknownst to her, however, an alligator lying nearby in the reeds spots her and pulls forward in the water. From there, we jump to a long overhead shot with the woman in the center, as the gator eventually pulls into the edge of the frame, silently catching up to her wake, as she languidly makes her way back to the dock. The shot then switches, putting us on top of the dock, with the woman hauling herself up, still oblivious to the danger as the gator continues agonizingly close behind her.
It's a fun scene, expertly rendered by writer/director Ti West to achieve maximum audience squirming -- a deliciously queasy effect West shoots to generate at various times from a host of other bloody viscera (he's fond of the particularly well placed squishy sound effect) -- but the rest of his "X," a shameless homage to '70s-era slasher flicks and the do-it-yourself porn movement, only works in fits and starts.
THE SET-UP
There's certainly nothing wrong with the set-up: It's 1979, and on the heels of the success of infamous early porn film "Debbie Does Dallas," enterprising businessman Wayne (Martin Henderson) has the idea to shoot a lo-fi porn movie ("The Farmer's Daughters") for the burgeoning VHS home market. He enlists his young fiancee, Maxine (Mia Goth), she of the overalls, and a woman named Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), one of the dancers at his exotic club, along with her boyfriend and former Marine, Jackson (Scott Mescudi), and hires a young filmmaker, RJ (Owen Campbell), and his girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) to shoot the film. For a location, Wayne finds a remote farm some distance away from the city, and rents the basic guest house on the property, owned by a creepy elderly couple, Howard (Stephen Ure), and his wife, Pearl (also Goth, apparently).
At first, things seem fine: The shoot goes well enough -- RJ, who has visions of cinematic grandeur for himself, believes he's making "a good dirty movie!" -- such that shy Lorraine, dubbed "Churchmouse" by blaring Wayne, makes a bid to appear in the film herself, as an actress. But then, Pearl, jilted by Howard, who fears sleeping with her will give him a heart attack, goes on the prowl, and the bodies of the would-be porn stars start piling up in bloody heaps.
WEST'S STYLE
West, the director of similar throwback material such as "The House of the Devil," and the more subtle "The Innkeepers," has a stylistic sense that goes past bent all the way to creased (he seems like the sort of fellow who has committed every shot in "The Hills Have Eyes" to memory), and a way to tease out amusing character interplay between otherwise standard genre types. He has a good eye, which also helps, but there's always something of a slap-dash feeling to his films, even with the understanding that they are meant to emulate the shagginess of their '70s predecessors (there are several self-conscious zoom shots, and many split screens).
The difference is those films were shot on extremely limited budgets, and literally were seat-of-the-pants affairs, by filmmakers more or less putting everything on credit cards to make the vision they had in mind. West, by contrast, puts the era's limitations on his work by choice, which can make for fun reference points for genre aficionados, but reduces the stakes considerably.
That said, he is certainly having fun with his creation, even if it feels more like a filmmaking exercise than a full-bodied vision. Given every indie director's fantasy -- working on an indie film that concerns itself with the making of an indie film -- West continually cuts one off the other. Time and again, he shuttles back and forth from a stilted 16mm porn scene shot by RJ to scenes between the elderly couple back at their dilapidated house, complete with visual segue comps (both characters bending down, say, or taking a drag from a cigarette).
West also makes much of the utter creepiness of Howard and Pearl -- when we first meet Howard, it's shot from behind, so we don't even get to see his face -- made easier by substituting young actors in a good deal of age prosthetics and fright wigs (when Pearl brushes her hair, it makes the wrenching sound of a rake being pulled through a field of straw), so as to enhance their freaky bearing, and give carte blanche for West to present them in the most decrepit ways possible.
While West's incentive remains abundantly clear, that of his characters is a good deal less considered. Pearl and Howard evidently have a history of such bloody recriminations -- as the miserable Lorraine finds out, there's another hippie corpse hanging down in the couples' basement -- but just why that is, beyond Howard's inability to physically please his wife, is pretty much left up to the ether, a motivation as fuzzy as a decades-old afghan. Clearly, West wants to call back the sort of psychosexual mishigas from the high-water mark of the original grindhouse era, but caught between modern psychological principles and throwback violent depiction, he strikes for a balance that results in being distractingly nonsensical -- the Ropers as depraved serial killers, as it were.
After giving us a dutiful setup, including the aforementioned pond scene, most of the rest of the film is spent going through its bloody pick-off mechanics (one character gets stabbed in the eye, one gets a shotgun blast, etc.), which feels less thrilling than obligatory. There are certainly pleasures to be had here, as West lovingly re-creates the vibe of an era gone to homicidal seed, but I suspect it will play better on the festival circuit (it debuted this past week at SXSW to audience raves), then in the multiplex, where not everyone will be in on the joke.
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None‘X’
83 Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi, Martin Henderson, Owen Campbell, Stephen Ure
Director: Ti West
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Playing theatrically
Ambitious young filmmakers RJ (Owen Campbell), Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), Maxine (Mia Goth), Jackson (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi) and Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) descend on a rural Texas farmhouse in Ti West’s “X.”