Review: X

A Kombi full of Texan city slickers rolls into the rural realm to shoot the porn flick that they hope will make their careers leap into the mainstream. It's 1979, the age of legitimised pornography like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas, so that's not too kooky a notion. It's also the age when young directors were pushing upwards into the mainstream with effective horror movies done on tiny budgets like, um Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre with which this film with its 4 X 3 opening scene promises kinship. So we got us a porny horror indy about indy porn looking like an indy slasher. Great.

When the cast and crew van up to the old farmhouse they are met with the shotgun of the owner who has forgotten he authorised the rental. It's sorted out by the confident producer who stands his ground and explains. But the old man is still an ornery cuss. One of the cast, surveying the scene, catches sight of a frail old woman with a wan expression who, in this shot, might not even be alive or even truly there.

So the gang gits down to the bang with lots of suggested sex on screen and dialogue about the movies and how this one will breakthrough to the big time. Meanwhile the old lady in the window before is real and stirring to life and is angry about it. The old man is getting worried about her. There's a gator in the waterin' hole yonder and fer goshsakes nuthin's endin' well around these here parts.

What follows is a standard slasher which, despite some well crafted gore, fails to deliver much tension and falls completely short on scares. There is a lot of othering about aging and sex including a scene that is meant to disgust younger viewers (destroying the context that's meant to support it). This is not to say it's not entertaining, it is and constantly. It's more that, having given us such a promising start it implodes into cliche and stays in that state until the end where a zinger is delivered in the dialogue that supposed to drip with irony but just feels written. Credits. There is reputedly a trailer for a prequel which I didn't bother waiting for.

Writer/director Ti West does this a lot, appealing and engaging start with a feeble finish straight from the text book. He enjoys a similar reputation to the young John Carpenter but where Carpenter invented tropes that became cliches in others' hands, West just picks them off the shelf after squandering well crafted characters and world building. Well, should say here, we don't get so much of the craft in the characterisation as everyone on screen seems to have been left in the fridge outside of their packaging and brought out odourless and flavourless.

After this I watched the beginning scenes of Boogie Nights and got to the scene where pornographer Jack Horner is explaining his vision of a porn industry as a kind of mega cinema, delivering gratification along with all the life lessons of the classics. It's intended as risible but is yet given a kind of dignity as an expression of naive vulnerability. It's less hip than the industry discussion in X but it's memorable and layered and made me want to watch the rest.

X was rented for this from Google Play Movies.