My reviews of
X and
Pearl from last year's Halloween Horror thread...
It may not mark the spot, but it sure hits it...
-
X (2022): 9/10
Engagingly brutal exercise in rural horror finds a small film crew (circa 1979), arriving at a remote farmhouse in Texas, where boorish producer Wayne Gilroy (Martin Henderson) hopes to make his own profitable
Debbie Does Dallas splash by shooting a quickie porno in the rustic surroundings. He's got his cast, including girlfriend Maxine (willowy Mia Goth) and adult-movie thespian couple Bobbie-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi) and crew, including ambitious screenwriter and director R.J. Nichols (Owen Campbell), and timid boom operator Lorraine (2022 horror ingenue find Jenna Ortega, also seen in this year's
Scream 5 and in the title role of the forthcoming Tim Burton Netflix miniseries
Wednesday), in tow, and they're enthusiastic to get down to business, in both senses of the term. Wayne's rented the guest house of the elderly farmer Howard (Stephen Ure) and his wife, Pearl (Goth again, in impressive old-age prosthetics), keeping the prurient nature of their film shoot on the down-low, and they quickly set to in making their ponographic opus "The Farmer's Daughter" into a reality...but their decrepit hosts are far less frail than they initially seem, and as the day gives way to night, their porno shoot turns into something akin to
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as the cast and crew find themselves picked off one by one in memorably gruesome ways.
Writer/director/co-editor Ti West (
The House Of The Devil,
The Innkeepers) makes a long-overdue return to the horror genre in this highly entertaining backwoods quasi-slasher, with game performances and enthusiastic spurts of gore. Like all of West's work, it's more elegant that one would be led to believe by the standards of the genre, teasing out moments of suspense with fiendish elan (and, in a split-screen sequence about halfway through juxtaposing a film crew sing-along with Pearl stroking her hair and preparing for bed, surprisingly eloquent). Mostly, it's just
fun in a way that doesn't descend into outright mockery while still earning some Sam Raimi-esque howls at particular exaggerated physical pratfalls. West shot a back-to-back prequel,
Pearl, which will start unspooling in theaters tomorrow, and will soon engage in a sequel,
MaXXXine, set for release next year, and if
X is any indication of where we're headed, we may be in for one of the all-time great horror movie trilogies. Bloody, satiric grand guignol fun.
-
Pearl (2022): 10/10
The second film in writer/director/editor Ti West's chronologically-jumbled horror triptych is an even more wildly entertaining exercise than this spring's
X. That film wallowed in post-Watergate late 1970s malaise, while this one travels back in time to 1918 (during an earlier, country-crippling Pandemic) and finds the elderly Pearl (Mia Goth) from the previous movie when she was a young woman working on her Germanic parents' rural farm. Her husband serving in the Great War, Pearl is left alone, spending what little free time she has dreaming of being on the Silver Screen and being adored by millions even as her stern mother (Tandi Wright) chastises her for her frivolous fantasties and for not doting on her paralyzed father (Matthew Sunderland) as much as she should. But Pearl won't let anything -
anything - keep her from achieving her goals, and her percolating dissatisfaction over her lot in life continues to simmer until it boils over in a heated confrontation with her mother that kicks off a string of violence that plumbs the darkest corners of Pearl's ambitions.
Pearl is a movie that's a wild tonal and stylistic shift from West's previous one. That movie revelled in the grindhouse scuzziness of the decade in which it was set, while this one harkens back to the Golden Era of Hollywood, replete with old-timey title cards, usage of wipe and iris out scene transitions and a
wonderful score by Tyler Bates and Tim WIlliams that fuses the swoony emotional crescendos of a Max Steiner or Franz Waxman with the groaning, motivic suspense chords of Bernard Herrmann. It all comes down on the willowy shoulders of Goth (who shares screenplay credit with director West), who crafts a character who is daft, touchingly naive, and evokes the tremulous self-loathing of Sissy Spacek in
Carrie (a key sequence between mother and daughter is a direct reference to Brian De Palma's classic). She's given a lengthy, tear-choked monologue late in the proceedings - captured in a tight, unbroken closeup - that's honestly some of the rawest, most mesmerising pieces of acting I have seen in any movie this year.
Pearl is a movie that opens on a note of borderline kitsch that deepens into a poignant display of thwarted dreams, even as it ends on a darkly funny sick joke. If the forthcoming
MaXXXine can stick the landing, this trilogy of terror tales may go down as one of the most interesting and successful series of horror films ever done. Highest recommendations!
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