Just the Ticket #169: X

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the TiXmaster,

Wishing you a Happy Valentine's Day!

An X can be many things, Ticketholders.

The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet. The Roman Numeral for the number ten. A common variable for solving equations. The long-debunked tenth planet in our solar system where Duck Dodgers and Marvin the Martian once did battle. The chemical that gave the Powerpuff Girls their ultra-super powers. A team of Marvel-ous Men (and women) and the alien-borne gene that made them Mutants. An undefinable factor that makes someone a star. A symbol marking treasure on a map (or an actor's blocking spot on a stage). Line up two of them, and you have the preferred beer of the Most Interesting Man In the World. Line up three, and you're advertising entertainment that is typically rated with only one. Maybe you're just texting someone a hug. Or you want to go first in a game of Tic Tac Toe. If you're divorced, you have at least one, and you are one, even if it's spelled slightly different. It's a common shorthand and politically correct substitution for the first syllable of Christmas, and was used by a famous civil rights activist in place of his given surname. It's how you close a computer program, and how you ruin Twitter (among the millions of other ways Twitter was ruined before and after a certain Elongated Muskrat came along). And finally, it's who's "Gon' Give It to Ya" in a song by the late, great DMX.

I would also like to know where my dawgs at, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't yet, leave a comment at the bottom of this post to let me know of any other uses of X that I missed, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to become an adult film star to pay the bills, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my farm-fresh content.

Okay, so I screwed up and watched Pearl first because they came out in the same year and I didn't pay enough attention to release order to know it was a prequel to X. But I'm glad I screwed up, because if I had watched X first, I'm not sure I would have been engaged enough to want to watch the rest of the trilogy.

Filmed in early 2021 (during which director Ti West and star Mia Goth co-wrote the script for Pearl, and the films were shot back-to-back), 2022's X follows the cast and crew of a fictional pornographic film, titled The Farmer's Daughter, as they attempt to make their movie while taking room and board on a certain Texas ranch.

Unfortunately, their landlords are Pearl (played by Mia Goth in ten hours worth of makeup and old age prosthetics) and her husband Howard (who is very much real, and oddly, he's played by Lord Of the Rings/The Hobbit regular Stephen Ure, but voiced by Until Dawn co-writer, character likeness, and voice actor Larry Fessenden).

X is set in the 70s, and as such is inspired by the exploitation and adult media of the decade, as well as road trip slasher pioneers like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, the original I Spit On Your Grave (which has no connection to the 1959 French film of the same name), and Psycho. Pearl in this movie even draws slight comparison to Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates' character in Misery).

The mostly disposable cast include blonde porn star Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow, Pitch Perfect), ex-Marine black porn star Jackson (Kid Cudi), "serious artist" screenwriter/cameraman RJ (Crank Yankers puppeteer Owen Campbell), soft-spoken boom girl Lorraine (Jenna Ortega, Scream), sleazy producer Wayne (Martin Henderson, Virgin River), and Wayne's Final Girlfriend Maxine (a dual role for Mia Goth). Also, their travel van says "Plowing Service" on the side and they stop at a gas station with a black rooster strutting around the parking lot. Subtle.

And we know the cast is disposable because the movie opens with a local Sheriff (Xena and Power Rangers actor James Gaylyn, because Texas is actually New Zealand in this trilogy) and his officers investigating the aftermath of their slaughter, thereby murdering all tension as well.

The saving grace of this movie, when it isn't making you watch the making of the most cliché, literally stereotypical porno of all time, or look at Old Pearl's saggy prosthetic tits, or listen to dialogue that barely matters because 69% of the cast is going to die anyway, or doing almost nothing important with the fact that the villain and Final Girl are played by the same person,...is the effects.

As "put the movie on in the background so you don't have to focus on it" disgusting as it is to look at, the Old Pearl makeup is impressive, as are the effects and techniques used to have Pearl and Maxine interact. A lot of it is reverse-angle with well-mixed ADR, body doubles, and selective focus, but the bed scene had some genuine, "how did they do that‽" movie magic to it that I couldn't figure out no matter how many times I ran it back. What's more, the gore effects were entirely practical and pretty convincing (or obscured by a given character being killed in the dark). Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, this is not.

But neither is it as stylish, disturbingly charming, character-rich, or genuinely scary as Pearl was.

I get that the whole idea of X was to hold up Pearl the character as a bad end for Maxine: not just a commentary on how age affects the perception of women in the film industry, but an illustration of the virtue of being focused on your goals versus merely idealizing your dreams and being comfortable with satisfying your short-term urges. You can kill to keep your dream alive, or you can fight to make it a reality, and that's a powerful message worth sharing. But for me, the message got lost in X being a grotesque, boring, technically impressive slice of nothing.

C-

Please help me keep the dream alive and make it a reality by cutting a big, meaty slice of remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't yet, leave a comment at the bottom of this post to let me know of any other uses of X that I missed, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to become an adult film star to pay the bills, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my farm-fresh content.

Next week, MaxXxine gets her big break, so Stay Tuned, and

TiXmaster,

Out.