A Trilogy of Terror?

Does a boxed set of three very recent releases count as a new title, or is it more of a catalogue deal? Because A24’s elaborate collection of Ti West’s X Trilogy arrived unexpectedly while I was in Windsor, and it just so happens that I’ve never written about any of them.

As a matter of fact, X was supposed to have been one of the very last movies I reviewed for NOW, complete with an interview with West. But things shifted, and Matt Reeves’ The Batman was my final review instead. I saw Pearl almost immediately afterward, in the programming cycle for TIFF 2022, and caught up to MaXXXine last year after that festival. They’re … fine, I guess?

If it never quite set the world on fire, West’s trilogy did become one of A24’s most reliable brands, with the studio packaging each picture as a cultural object rather than the lurid period pieces West wants them to be, supplementing each release with elaborate novelizations and soundtrack albums and clothes and art prints and piggy banks. It’s a fascinating contradiction, and those who’ve been bought into it will likely display this set on their coffee table with pride.

Because Ti West’s X Trilogy is very consciously designed as a coffee-table piece. It even includes an actual art book! A handsome one, packed with production stills, concept art, costume sketches and set-decoration ephemera; the selection of VHS cassette art created for Maxine Minx’ library is almost worth the price of the thing on its own.

But you also get the movies, of course. Previously released by Lionsgate in the US and VVS Films in Canada – with X and Pearl only available in Blu-ray – they’re now getting the luxe A24 treatment in your choice of 4K or BD. I don’t believe the image has been remastered, but the sound has: All three features now sport Dolby Atmos soundtracks in either format, whereas X and Pearl were originally released on disc with DTS-HD Master Audio.

A24 has also commissioned new audio commentaries for all three films, though none of them features West; instead, cinematographer Eliot Rockett and production designer Tom Hammock cover X and Pearl while production designer Jason Kisvarday and set decorator Kelsi Ephraim tackle MaXXXine. West does turn up on the MaXXXine disc, in a half-hour Drafthouse Q&A with Jen Yamato – one of several supplements that first appeared on the individual Lionsgate releases, and are carried over to the appropriate discs here.

MaXXXine does offer one new extra, an interview with composer Tyler Bates. Bates scored all three films, and offers his thoughts on their very different musical soundscapes: Breathy vocals and percussion in X, a rich orchestral approach for Pearl and an immediately recognizable ’80s-sleaze buffet of electronic music, sax and guitar for MaXXXine.

It’s all engaging and well-argued, but I keep coming up against how hard everyone is working and how trifling the results turned out to be. Yes, West is doing exactly what he wants to do in X, a feature-length homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre filtered through the violently repressed lens of a Friday the 13^th movie; the notion that we’re watching wholesome, lovable pornographers get mutilated lets West have fun with certain genre tropes, but other than the superficial pleasures there’s just not much going on here. Even the technically impressive feat of having Mia Goth play both the Final Girl and the killer has no real impact on the film beyond its stuntiness; I’d argue it has less and less significance on the story as the series progresses.

Thank the pandemic for the trilogy, I suppose, since once West realized he and his crew were going to be stuck in New Zealand he decided to spend that time making Pearl, set in the 1920s and letting Mia Goth play a younger version of her axe-wielding X antagonist. And yes, it fills in a couple of blanks for the older Pearl’s motivation in X – in addition to lustful rage, we can now add envy of Maxine being able to live the dream Pearl’s younger self was denied – and also introduces us to future Superman David Corenswet as a hunky projectionist with a weedy little moustache. But other than Rockett’s intensified Technicolor cinematography and the elaborate period production design – and Goth’s signature intensity, of course – there’s just not that much here.

Still two films must nowadays beget a trilogy, so once everyone was back in the US, MaXXXine could resolve the story threads left dangling in X … and West could play around in the glossy grime of Brian De Palma and Michael Mann’s ’80s thrillers, with Goth’s Maxine having relocated to Hollywood a few years after the events of X, trying to cross over from softcore into legit movies, only to find herself stalked by a maniac determined to punish her for her past sins by murdering her friends and colleagues.

With all of L.A. as its canvas and a much larger ensemble of much bigger names – Elizabeth Debicki as a director, Lily Collins as an actress, Sophie Thatcher as a makeup artist, Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale as cops, Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine's agent and Kevin Bacon as an even sleazier dick than the one he played in Wild Things – at West's disposal, MaXXXine is easily the most ambitious of the three films. But it, too, winds up as less than the sum of its parts, a bunch of references and set pieces that orbit one another rather than accumulating momentum or gravity. Maxine Minx may be a star, but she still hasn’t found the vehicle she deserves. Maybe that’s the point of this box set, which exists more to be looked at than played. That’d be a pretty bold statement, all things considered.

Now, if you’re looking for less ambitious cinema – or at least two movies that set reasonable goals for themselves and achieve them in an entertaining fashion – I have you covered.

First, there’s Relay, which arrives on disc this week in a bare-bones Blu-ray from Bleecker Street Films by way of Decal Releasing. The latest mainstream thriller from David Mackenzie finds the director chasing the same high of crowd-pleasing cynicism and underdog heroism that worked for him so well in Hell and High Water a few years back – only this one plays out in an urban setting rather than a rural one.

Lily James is a woman named Sarah, who's in possession of a volatile document that could destroy the corporation that employs her. She contacts Ash (Riz Ahmed), an off-grid reconciliation expert who specializes not in bringing explosive documents to light, but in helping return such materials to their rightful owners once would-be whistleblowers change their minds about going up against massive corporate villains.

But as Ash runs Sarah through the steps necessary to stay safe and undetected, he finds he's placing himself at risk ... of feelings. Maybe this is the person who can reconnect him to the world after years being a ghost in the global machine. Maybe she’s the one who can teach him to trust again.

Don't expect a modern-day Michael Collins; Relay is not going to give you that. Screenwriter Justin Piasecki isn't interested in riffing on the ’70s paranoid thrillers that have slipped back into the cultural context for no reason whatsoever.

But as a moment-to-moment thriller where Riz Ahmed uses ingenuity and a series of silly disguises to thwart an increasingly annoyed corporate heavy played by Sam Worthington and his team of surveillance assholes, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Also, Victor Garber has an early cameo as another corporate monster and plays his one scene with barely concealed impatience, which is exactly perfect.

The script doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it's fun to watch the labyrinthine plot unfold from one scene to the next. The location work in New York and its environs is slick and neon-soaked in exactly the same way Sharper was couple of years ago – another neo-noir confection with nothing on its mind other than getting us to the next plot twist – and James is casually glamorous in a self-reflexive action-heroine sort of way that, again, doesn’t actually make sense but helps frame the film as a glossy trifle. (And “glossy” is the watchword for Decal’s disc, which has no special features whatsoever but presents the film in an excellent 1080p/24 transfer with busy DTS-HD 5.1 audio.)

Relay may not reinvent the wheel, but it can provide a decent ride. It looks and sounds good, the corporations are evil, the scrappy little guy makes their henchmen look bad a lot, justice is ultimately done. It’s no Night Moves, but you could do worse.

Finally, at last, we have Clown in a Cornfield, which arrived on disc last month but only reached me this week, just in time for Halloween. It’s another film that knows exactly what it is, and has fun with its simple (if simplistic) premise: What if clown in a cornfield? What if clown not in a cornfield?

The pitch for Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil director Eli Craig’s new genre picture is, well, generic: Freshly arrived in the small town of Kettle Springs, where her dad’s starting a new job, troubled teenager Quinn Maybrook quickly discovers things are not quite as bucolic as they seem – and that a murderous secret from the past might have returned to pick up its bloody rampage right where it left off.

And, honestly? The murderous-clown stuff is less important than that relationship. Quinn and her dad Glenn are dealing with their own shit and have very little time for the bloody antics of Frendo the Clown, and Katie Douglas and Aaron Abrams capture that relationship wonderfully. They're the reason Craig’s slasher riff works as well as it does.

The violence – which is amped up considerably from Adam Cesare’s 2020 YA novel, as I understand it, though not quite Scream-level brutal – will draw a crowd, but their commitment to the reality of the father-daughter relationship gives Clown in a Cornfield its heart. And also its laughs.

Full disclosure: Aaron and Katie are both Friends of SEMcast, so obviously I’m rooting for them, but they’re also versatile performers and genuinely good people, and I was delighted to see the work they put into these characters. Frendo’s pretty one-note as slashers go, and the nature of his presence is similarly familiar, but Quinn and Glenn? I could watch a whole franchise about those two.

Elevation’s disc presents the feature in a solid 1080p/24 transfer with DTS-HD 5.1 audio, and throws in a fun group commentary featuring Craig, Cesare, Douglas and co-star Carson McCormack that has the same sort of relaxed but prideful vibe as the conversations we see among the would-be pornographers of X. They know exactly what kind of movie they wanted to make, and went out and made it – in wintertime, with the grounds crew taking blowtorches to patches of snow so they could make it look more like autumn – and nobody got murdered. Good for them.

Ti West’s X Trilogy is now available in separate 4K and Blu-ray sets from A24 Films. Relay is available on Blu-ray from Decal Releasing. Clown in a Cornfield is out on Blu-ray from Elevation Pictures in the Canada and RLJ Entertainment in the US, which has also released a 4K steelbook edition.

Up next: The Warner Archive revives The Evil of Frankenstein in an elaborate new 4K edition, and speaking of misfits, Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 gets an upgrade of its own in the Shout Select series. And don’t forget Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter for paid subscribers – it’s just an easy upgrade away!