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Overview
Welcome to the great bonus episode for season 05. Rhys got a great idea for this one full season of director rehash. Pick a director that we both loved, but also that had a unique trilogy of movies. And there we go – the Ti West bonus episode. If you’ve stuck with us for the entire season, you’ll enjoy our discussion of these 3 great movies.
We watched the X trilogy – X, Pearl, and MaXXXine. Unique stories that are interconnected. A fun take on an overarching horror story. And Mia Goth plays all the parts well and adds the right amount of creepiness in the stories. And in true Ti West fashion, there are plenty of call backs to past eras of movie making. To make it even specialer – he has callbacks to his own X trilogy. Masterfully brilliant!
So as we say goodbye to directors we’ve seen twice (or more), we give you a good afternoon of movie enjoyment. Well, Ti gave it to you, we just make it better. Right? 😉
Trailer
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Pearl – https://amzn.to/3JcZ7TU
MaXXXine – https://amzn.to/45crpVZ
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Transcription
Horror Lasagna S05 Bonus Ti West
[00:00:00]
Stephen: Damn it. If anybody wants to hear the really good intro we had too bad. Bonus. Bonus for season five. Ty West. Here we go. Where’s the intro?
Rhys: Nice.
Stephen: The other intro just wasn’t working. Obviously it kept killing us.
Rhys: It, it did.
Stephen: Okay. Notes, lemme pull up notes.
Rhys: We love T West.
Stephen: I love Ty West.
Rhys: It wasn’t just house the Devil, it was Innkeepers. All of his movies just amazing. And so we’re going to look at his ex trilogy today.
Stephen: Yes, and I hadn’t seen any of ’em, but I’ve gotten good feedback from just about everybody.
Rhys: Oh, good. It’s funny ’cause I don’t know that it, I don’t think it intentionally was supposed to be a trilogy. And this is one of the nice things about T West is that, he’s friends with everybody. Like he’s one of those guys who’s friends with [00:01:00] all the directors who are out there. He’s friends with all of the various actors who are out there.
And I don’t know if you remember, it was an Airy Astor, one of the Airy Astor movies we did. I said he was in the Criterion Closet where they have him pull out things off of the Criterion Collection that he likes. There is actually a. Movie rental place in Paris that does the same thing. And I watched Ty West do that.
Yeah. And he is a huge fan of old horror cinema.
Stephen: That shows in a lot of what he’s done. And let me just say. Before we go too much further I wanna do a shout out to everybody that does listen to our podcast. We sometimes mention a few people you’ve run into, but we’ve got some people that we’ve run into that listen to it and we’ve got people that make comments on YouTube and stuff, and that’s great.
That’s what we love, love hearing from people. Love that people are enjoying it. So everybody that we haven’t done a shout out for [00:02:00] specifically, hey, we appreciate it. We really do.
Rhys: Big blanket statement for y’all.
Stephen: There you go. No generalizations going on here.
Rhys: That’s right.
Stephen: Okay. Ty West, who we love
Rhys: West. Yeah. So he he had done a lot of movies independently himself before he started the X Trilogy. And because of the successes that he had a 24 picked him up to do a movie.
Stephen: which. It fit very well because if you look at a 20 four’s logo here, it looks like something from the seventies. If you watch it.
Rhys: It does. So they picked him up to do X and they were flying him out to do X. They were shooting it in New Zealand. He said there’s this one little spot way up in the mountains that if you squint just right at the right time of day, it looks like Texas. He was going out to do that. And COVID hit, and I don’t know if you remember, but of all the countries in the world, the one that was most successful in fighting [00:03:00] COVID early on was New Zealand.
Stephen: Yeah,
Rhys: So they touched down in New Zealand.
Stephen: because the hobbits don’t go anywhere,
Rhys: That’s right. They all stay in. They touched down and as they were touching down, he had this great idea and he reached out to a 24. He is like, Hey, look, we’ve got the people here. We’ve got the gear here. We’re gonna be stuck here because of COVID. What if we filmed a second movie and a 24 is like.
All right, send us a script and see what happens. So they land and there’s a mandatory in New Zealand at the time, there was a mandatory two week isolation period. So you went to your hotel room, you get off a plane, you go to your hotel room, you stay there for two weeks. In that two week period of time working with Mia Goth, he sat down and wrote the script for Pearl. And by the time that his isolation was up, he sent that to a 24 and they green lit that too.
Stephen: Wow.[00:04:00]
Rhys: Yeah. So the script for Pearl, I mean granted there were two people working on it, but they got the whole thing done in two weeks.
Stephen: Nice.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: Which, goes back again. We’ve talked about this. Why do we really need movies that cost 500 million to make
Rhys: Yeah. And he’s, it’s not, he’s, that’s his thing, like when he was in I think it was a film school in New York. One of his professors was gonna introduce him to another director that he liked a lot. They were gonna bring the director into the class. And it just wasn’t happening.
And it wasn’t happening. And so Ty kept bothering his professor about it, and his professor’s look, you’re the only one who seems to care. Here’s the guy’s phone number. So he called the guy up and they met and they sat down, had lunch and they hit it off and he became his in. He interned there and then the guy was like, what would it, if money wasn’t an [00:05:00] object, would you be able to do a movie?
And he’s yeah. And he’s show me your script and I’ll give you 50 grand to make a movie. And. So he’s will do, and he gets on the subway and on the way back he’s oh shit, I need a script. And so over the weekend he comes up, I think it’s called The Roost, comes up with a script for the roost, brings it back to the guy.
He is like, all right, here’s your 50 grand. And he went out and shot it. It was his first, it was his first movie
Stephen: That was even easier. Easier than Jeremy Gardner’s battery.
Rhys: right. Yeah. Yeah. Just this guy is Hey. But it also reminded me of Desi who did last shift because he had the same thing with the guy who did Hellraiser, the guy who wrote it.
He was asked about this trilogy, what his whole goal was, and he, and. He was saying in the interview that he wanted to take these films that a lot of people looked down on and he wanted [00:06:00] to produce them with a very high level of craft so that when you sat there and watched it, whether you didn’t like the style or it wasn’t the kind of movie you were into, you would still be able, you couldn’t deny the fact that it was well made.
Stephen: And I can think of examples of movies like that in mul, other genres, it was just so well made, but the story sucked and I didn’t care about the movie, but it was so well made,
Rhys: yep. And so they asked do you think you could have done X in a different decade? Or, w was the seventies key for you to do X in? And he was like, yes, because the level of craft in that period was so far above what it is right now. And in all these movies, he wanted to show the backside of the entertainment industry.
So it,
Stephen: porn.
Rhys: yes. He chose porn. You get to see how the porn is made and [00:07:00] he was like, porn was one of the easiest things back then for people to get into show business because you didn’t need anything. All you needed was a camera to record and people who were willing to do it and like a distribution model was pretty much already there.
It was just a matter of you doing it. And then in. In Pearl you get the whole backstory with the movies and the projectionist is like this main character. And so that’s the backstory. And then Maxine like literally takes place on a movie lot,
Stephen: I love that. I love how he does those types of things, and that’s important to him.
Rhys: Yeah. I think one of the other things that’s super key to the the whole thing and you really can’t deny it, is Mia Goth was just phenomenal in all of these. And hearing him talk about her, he is yes she’s incredible. [00:08:00] She’s very powerful. The way people talk about her, it almost seems like she’s dangerous on set.
Stephen: She, that’s her what her characters are definitely like.
Rhys: And it’s because she gets so into it, there’s not a risk she’s not willing to take to, to get what she thinks she needs to deliver for the role. In fact, at the end of at the end of Pearl that. On her face that just seems to last forever. It just happened because when they were filming that last scene, they did that scene.
She starts smiling. Wes just refused to call cut. He just kept recording and recording until he had this huge amount of stuff to be able to go through and say, Hey, you know what? I want this to be uncomfortably long, and we’ll put credits over top of it. And hey, it worked out.
Stephen: Wow, [00:09:00] that’s crazy. ’cause I was, that scene, I’m watching it and I’m even going, man, she’s really good at the expression changing without changing. And she starts crying and stuff, but to know the story and how many times do we hear stuff like that, it’s like an happy accident. Bob Ross would always say, those are the ones that come that really sometimes make the most impact.
Rhys: Yeah. And there’s this whole scene where they’re sitting at dinner. It’s her and Mitzi, not dinner. They’re both sitting at a table. They’re not eating anything. And Maya’s just, Maya Pearl is talking to Mitzi and she’s like talking to her as though she were her husband and she’s going through this whole thing.
And all of a sudden I’m like, oh my God, this has been one shot.
Stephen: Oh, I.
Rhys: whole soliloquy at the table, it’s five and a half minutes nonstop of Pearl just going on this whole thing. I was like, oh my God, that took forever.
Stephen: I didn’t even realize that was one child. I’m [00:10:00] gonna have to go watch that scene again.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: Because I usually, I pick up on those things. Like I told you, the presence, which I saw in the theater had some shots like that, that were just like, wow, that cameraman is a character here, because that shot was amazing.
I didn’t even realize it here. That’s cool. I’m about to watch now.
Rhys: Yeah it’s pretty amazing. There. I think one of the things that kind of, I don’t wanna say annoyed me, but it humored me maybe a bit, was all the interviews I was watching were after Maxine was coming out, and so everyone was asking him, what his favorite one of the trilogy was.
And of course he’s gonna say Maxine because but just like reception wise, if you look at it. while not being panned, but it was certainly the least heralded of them all. It was nominated for seven awards. We don’t know how many they won because a lot of these awards will come out at the end of this year.
Stephen: I wonder how that might have [00:11:00] changed if they had done three movies all at once in New Zealand?
Rhys: That would’ve been really hard since Maxine takes place in Hollywood.
Stephen: Yes, at least written it and maybe filmed it like closer. These were like two years apart.
Rhys: yeah, and he was saying one of the worst things about this was actually filming in Hollywood. Because for a place that’s supposed to be all about movies, the permitting and shutting roads down and things is such a huge pain in the butt. It’s like he was like, it almost just wasn’t worth it. As opposed to, he’s that’s why people are moving to Georgia and stuff to shoot these things in Cleveland.
Yeah. Because, the permitting process is, oh, you wanna make a movie, please, we’ll take your money.
Stephen: Yeah, you could just do what they did with Baskin. Just throw your cameras out real quick. Film it, the old fashioned filming and jump back in and go
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: there.
Rhys: X did better. It had 53 total nominations and it won four of those. [00:12:00] But if you want to talk about, your art house film of the trilogy, Pearl Pearl had 83 nominations in 19 wins.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: And probably more so of any other movie set that we’ve talked. If you haven’t seen this, you should watch this trilogy
Because at least one of these is going to be in a style you will like.
Stephen: yes. Yeah, and I wholly recommend watching ’em in release order, not in chronological order. They definitely were filmed. A certain order and makes sense that way, even though chronologically it doesn’t, it drives me crazy with people who insist on watching things chronologically, like CS Lewis lion Witch in the wardrobe, putting brother’s, nephew, magician, or whatever first, and it’s no, that doesn’t, that’s not the first one, but whatever.
Definitely watch X first and pearl second,
Rhys: especially because, especially if you’re really [00:13:00] gonna.
Stephen: right.
Rhys: For starting out with just a movie that turned into two, that turned into a trilogy. He did an amazing job of tying stuff together.
Stephen: Oh my God. Not just story plot lines, which you wouldn’t have thought tied together, but some of the scenes that are in one are in x. We show up done differently in Pearl and Maxine for different reasons. And, and some of the things they’re doing, the actual actions reflect even through the time periods.
Yeah it, that was pretty, I love that type of stuff. All the little interwoven this.
Rhys: There’s this scene in X as they pull in and Old Pearl in X is looking out of the window of their farmhouse at them, which is eerily reminiscent of Psycho
In Pearl. She’s running around and her mother is in the same house. 80, 60 years earlier doing the exact same thing. Looking at that window being eerily similar to [00:14:00] Psycho
Stephen: yes.
Rhys: and then in Maxine, they are literally on the set with the hotel from Psycho. So it’s that kind of thing. It’s that whole I will not accept a life I don’t deserve.
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: Maxine says in in X, several times when you go to Pearl, she goes to the cinema and there is a guy wearing a sandwich board in town that has that phrase on it. And then in Maxine, it is like the driving force to the movie.
Stephen: Yeah. Yep. She’s still doing coke all the way from X to Maxine. I’m pretty impressed by that because she, her looks held up and she’s not like
Rhys: Her nose hasn’t collapsed. As far as cast wise go, there’s only two actors the only one actor appears in all three, and that’s Mia Goth. The other person who shows up in two of the three is Simon pst. And [00:15:00] Simon PRT plays her father.
Stephen: Which that was another good tie in from the very beginning when they turn on the TV and then it shows back up. I’m like, dang, that’s a lot of impressive Easter egg interwoven this year.
Rhys: Absolutely. And like he puts little visual cues in too, all throughout the thing, right? So when they’re leaving the strip club in X, they’re walking out and Brittany Snow, who plays Bobby Lynn comes walking out. There’s a picture paint a mural painted on the side of this of an alligator, grabbing some girl’s bikini bottoms and pulling them down.
Bobby Lynn ends up being pulled into the water and eaten by an alligator.
Stephen: The alligator was a good character throughout too.
Rhys: It was and the funny thing is. Back in Pearl’s days, she actually named the alligator, her name was Thea. And then in the [00:16:00] second one in. Now that’s in Pearl in X. The alligator shows up, but you don’t really hear her name. But in Maxine, at one point in time, Maxine is on Hollywood Boulevard. She’s smoking, she takes a cigarette and throws it down, and it lands on a star belonging to Thera Berra, which was the actress that Pearl named the Alligator off of back in Pearl.
Stephen: I missed that one. That’s pretty good.
Rhys: It’s just all of this real subtle, complex stuff interwoven together. A lot of people were saying, Hey, is there gonna be a fourth one in this installment while they were interviewing him? And he was like, eh blah, blah, blah, maybe, I don’t know. We’ll see what the character wants to do in this.
And I’m thinking in my head, after I watch it, I’m like, screw that. I wanna see a trilogy of the Puritan,
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: because just the shots that he was showing in Maxine, I was like, that actually [00:17:00] looks pretty good. I would watch that.
Stephen: Yeah. That’s funny. That would be great. That would be a, that would, okay, so one of the things I admire recently about Stephen King is he released pretty much all of his short stories. To be licensed to student filmmakers for a dollar that they could remake. And that’s why we’ve gotten a plethora of some of his short stories in movies in recent years.
So if a student film could be made with any of his short stories, they just have to license it for a buck. I thought that was pretty fantastic. So that Ty West should do something like that with the Puritan Fi. He’s a big enough name. He is indie. He started small, encourage the next generation of filmmakers.
Rhys: It’s really amazing. I said he was friends with everybody. And I’ve told you about this and for those of you who don’t know our good friend for who does Victor Crowley, our good friend. We don’t know him. Adam Green seems like he’d be a
Stephen: We wish we could say, yeah we’ve talked [00:18:00] about ’em so much.
Rhys: He has a series on YouTube called Adam Green Scary Sleepovers. It’s actually on Aries Vision, which was like this online. Site where he would put up production stuff. And it happened before Victor Crowley and after Hatchet three, that’s, that was the time period he was doing this. Ty West was actually on one of his sleepy Scare, scary sleepovers.
And so watching that I was like, wow, that’s really cool. And then I found another interview. It was a panel interview and he was being interviewed. By the actress, I’ll tell you her name here in a second, by the actress from your next
Charney Vinton. And she was actually there doing the interview and she pointed out Ty West acts in your next, [00:19:00] he’s I was only in it for five minutes, and I’m like.
That’s insane. And so I looked it up and if you look up your next on IMDB under the cast, he is listed. If you look up Ty West, he doesn’t have any acting credits on his IMDB page,
Stephen: Interesting.
Rhys: but that’s what I mean. All of these people all know him and he knows all of these people. There’s a whole lot of crossover that goes on between, which I just think is super cool.
Stephen: Which is why come Maxine, you get Kevin Bacon in it. Not many small indie filmmakers are getting Kevin Bacon.
Rhys: And Kevin Bacon. What an amazing job. I knew it was amazing just because I utterly loathed his character so much.
Stephen: Kevin Bacon has definitely entered that phase of his acting career where he is I don’t give a shit what I’m doing if I’m enjoying it. And he just doesn’t care. And it really does come across [00:20:00] ’cause his characters are really good. The bondsmen, the Guardians of the Galaxy thing he did as himself.
This, some of the things I’ve seen are just really good lately.
Rhys: Yeah, I, I was floored when I saw that he was in it. It was, it’s really funny because there were surprises through all of them. If you look at the casting, so if you’re looking at X, it’s a movie about making pornos in the seventies that turns into a slasher film.
Stephen: Which fits very well. It a little bit of it’s even disturbing.
Rhys: Yeah. So I’m like, okay, who’s he gonna get? I know Mia Goths in there. She is like his muse through this. I get that and good on her for being willing to do all this, but I’m like, who else is in this? Jenna Ortega is in the movie for God’s sakes.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Brittany Snow is
Stephen: And Jen Ortega’s character, I almost didn’t recognize her. I looked at, I’m like, that seems an awful lot like Jen Ortega and I’m, oh my God, its, her character was just so opposite of anything else I’ve ever seen her in.[00:21:00]
Rhys: Oh, absolutely. And she did a fabulous job like she could if she hadn’t gone on to be ridiculously successful in everything else she touched. She could have just gone on to become a regular old scream queen. Because her performance, like getting out of the basement in that place was spot on. Like I, she sold it.
I was 110% behind her.
Stephen: Arguably, she may not be classified scream queen, but she’s done some horror. She did Wednesday, which is, that borderline horror, it’s the horror themes, it’s not cheerleaders. And then death of a Unicorn, which I saw and she was really good in. She’s got some horror behind her.
Rhys: Yeah. Kid Cutie was in there playing Jackson, the most confident naked black man I think I’ve ever seen.
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: Just standing there in the doorway talking to the old guy Brittany Snow played Bobby Lynn. If you’re [00:22:00] sitting there watching. Pitch perfect. And you’re like, oh, they all look so ideal and sweet.
Here she is naked simulating sex, for this porno movie.
I’m like, wow. That just blew my mind how much she was like willing to.
Stephen: let’s do a whole retrospective pitch. Perfect. 1, 2, 3, x.
Rhys: Yeah. Apparently her vocal career didn’t take off,
Stephen: other, she has other body parts.
Rhys: And then it was really funny to me because Martin Henderson plays Wayne and you’re probably like, who’s Martin Henderson? And I’m sure he is been in another stuff because this is a bonus I didn’t go through and look everything up. As soon as you see him from the very start of the thing, he really just strikes me as Gary Sandys.
Andy Travis from WKRP in Cincinnati.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Doesn’t he [00:23:00] look just like him?
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: I know it wasn’t him, so you really can’t count him as some big celebrity who ends up showing up in this movie. But,
Stephen: gonna do a Simpson, K-W-K-R-P reboot. There you go.
Rhys: Yeah, absolutely. And hey, I would probably watch that.
Stephen: Yeah, but does anybody really know what radio stations are anymore?
Rhys: That’s a really good point. Pearl, I don’t know. Nobody jumped out at me from Pearl.
Stephen: Other.
Rhys: M Goth. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t like David Corin Sweat played the projectionist. He might be like one of these young Heartthrobs who’s in a bunch of stuff now. I just didn’t recognize him.
Stephen: The mother, the very strict puritanical mother was very standout.
Rhys: Tandy Wright. And the funny thing is she was involved with X, [00:24:00] so it’s not funny. It’s actually surprising to me that the number of people didn’t cross over as much because they were all still there. And as soon as he was done with X, he went right into Pearl. So Kid Coie actually is a producer, has a producer credit.
For Pearl. He stuck around, he helped out with the movie, so Jackson from X is a producer and, but Tandy Wright worked on X as well. She was the intimacy coordinator.
Stephen: Wow. Okay. I just, that’s a great, I guess it’s a better title than Fluffer
Rhys: it’s a legitimate it’s the sag, it’s the SAG afters title for the person who is supposed to make everyone comfortable in, intimate scenes like that. That was her job.
Stephen: She did a great job. They seemed very comfortable.
Rhys: oh yeah, for sure. But she didn’t speak German. [00:25:00] Before this and so she basically took, went on a two week crash course and her German coming out of this, apparently, I don’t speak German, but people have said that she has been mistaken for being two German tourists while she was practicing, were in New Zealand and they thought that she was German.
Stephen: Wow. That’s pretty, pretty impressive, especially being stuck in New Zealand. Not exactly the German hotbed to learn a language.
Rhys: Yeah. And you know everyone else’s performances too. Matthew Sunderland, he plays Mia’s father, and you’re like the guy’s in a wheelchair. How rough can that be? But the amount of emotions and changes in his character over the period of the movie. Amazing because he sits there and he is in the chair and he’s pretty much nonresponsive. But at the end of the movie, I start to [00:26:00] wonder, was he just playing up nonresponsive because when Pearl starts to lose it and kills her mother, he has a look of concern and when it comes time that she’s going to kill him, he knows it’s coming and he starts to cry and it’s wow.
He’s wasn’t like vegetative, he was just trapped in there
Stephen: And when they went to feed him, his mouth opened and he swallowed. And yeah. But again, I think that’s some of the subtle T west stuff. This guy isn’t talking, isn’t moving, he is slumped over, but you get these little clues that maybe he’s not,
Rhys: Yeah,
Stephen: on, I love that, that it, we talk about dumb American movies, we don’t have to focus on it.
Rhys: he’s, he is an American director too. So good on him. Maxine had MA goth, of course it had Halsey is in it.
Stephen: Yes, I saw that.
Rhys: It has Kevin Bacon. I’m trying to think who else in [00:27:00] here was actually like a big name. No one else is really jumping out at me, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not in there. Hey, if you’re we’re actually in the movie, I apologize for not.
Stephen: Hey, if you were actually in the movie and you’re listening to our podcast, that’s awesome. We love you.
Rhys: That’s true. That’s true. Comment below and we’ll mention you again.
Stephen: Yours.
Rhys: That’s true. I think. So here’s. Here’s what I think is so brilliant about this trilogy. You have a couple tropes in horror that show up all the time, and we talked about two of them when we did incident in Ghost Land. You have fear of transgender individuals, trans transvestites. You have. You have a fear of large mentally handicapped individuals. Now we’re [00:28:00] gonna go outside of that and you’ll see this in a million movies. Fear of creepy little kids doing what they shouldn’t be doing, and then fear of super old people.
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: It’s not, it’s. It’s a trope because it shows up quite often and I’m not, all of the places are bad. But didn’t, SHA Shalan had what the visit was that
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: You had the taking of Deborah Gordon and then you have X and so he’s gonna go in and he is going to embrace this trope where you have this. Psychotic murdering old couple who successfully goes ahead and kills like six young people. But then what he did that was so brilliant is he goes back and he does Pearl and shows you her at her peak,
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: and all of a sudden it’s because a lot of those movies seem to be about. Loss of time loss of dreams and [00:29:00] regret.
That seems to be that, and ambition are like the theme of these films. But in doing that, he takes this thing where you have this and you, you can see it between the characters. Because Bobby Lynn, when she sees Pearl on the dock, she’s oh, my grandma had dementia. And she’s being sweet.
She’s being nice. She’s not scared. She should have been, but she’s not scared. Then you see Maxine, when she sees her, anytime she sees her, she seems repulsed disgusted because she didn’t have that influence in her life. And that’s the feeling that I think most filmmakers are trying to impart when they put super old characters in their movies.
But then to go back and show them in their prime is just a brilliant and not like a flashback, like an
Stephen: Whole movie. The whole movie’s a flashback. Right there too. That’s the definition of [00:30:00] horror, right? Of what makes you feel uncomfortable in that, what we’ve gotten from Merriam Webster or whatever. And Colin even brought that up when we were discussing things. So here’s my thing, if you have not seen X, if you want the quintessential.
Let’s make you uncomfortable. Scene in a horror movie. It is two psycho 80 year olds having sex on a bed while you’re trapped underneath it. That’s the quintessential top of the line. Make you uncomfortable. Horror scene.
Not scary, not slashers, not, any of that uncomfortable.
Rhys: yeah. There’s no blood or anything like that.
Stephen: It should be sweet.
And that what it is. In most movies, they have all the music and the lights and candles. No, this is they’re crazy psychos and this is very disturbing and she’s caught underneath and yeah, that, that’ll make you uncomfortable all day.
Rhys: He did a great job too, of capturing the look and feel of the various periods that he was basing these in. So X definitely felt a slasher movie [00:31:00] from the seventies, from the late seventies from. There’s just no two ways around it. The way that the credits rolled, the way that he shot it, I think that he did more bounce cut edits than you would typically see back then.
Stephen: Probably
Rhys: But, stylistic,
Stephen: he did his movie that was supposed to fool you into thinking it was made in the seventies. He did that so he can pull the feel of the seventies into this without necessarily doing it all the way again.
Rhys: It is true and Pearl is originally he wanted to do it in black and white,
Stephen: Which it would’ve made sense. Why it would’ve made sense, because when she rides that bike, it’s just like Mrs. Gulch from Wizard of Oz
Rhys: on purpose. Like she’s got the dress and the hat.
Stephen: and the Scarecrow that she has sex with. Most disturbing sex scenes in any horror movie right here, these three
Rhys: And that was again, you pointed it out with, in the bunkhouse with Pearl and Howard, that scene of her dancing [00:32:00] with the Scarecrow would ordinarily That’s right. Outta like the sound of music or something like that. Until all of a sudden it’s not,
Stephen: Right.
Rhys: you’re like, wait a second.
Stephen: And that was a creepy ass scarecrow with the paper mache like face almost.
Rhys: Oh yeah. It could have just been a person.
Stephen: That’s, I was wondering that until I saw the feet with the straw and the boots weren’t connected. I thought, oh my God, it’s a dead body, like Night of the Scarecrow, but it wasn’t.
Rhys: just whipping it around but he like that is, so that show was so technicolor the way that the credits came up with the who.
Stephen: Yes,
Rhys: And the fonts she used, it was also dead on. About the only period issue I could have possibly come up with is when she goes into town to the cinema. It is very art deco, which was in vogue at the time, but I don’t think it would’ve been in vogue in rural [00:33:00] Texas.
Stephen: That’s probably true.
Rhys: Aside from that, even the style he picked was a legitimate style at the time. I just, that was super hot in New York or Paris, not just outside of
Stephen: I’ll give him that. A lot of times you have to do things in movies that fit the perceptions of the majority
Rhys: Oh yeah.
Stephen: And if he had done it to where we would’ve been like, oh my God, that was so authentic. Or people would be like, that wasn’t how it was, from what I know.
Rhys: And if you’re gonna pick a period, I, I enjoy the art deco period just in general architecturally and the art and everything. And then when you switches to Maxine, that literally could have just been like a made for TV movie. Obviously not. ’cause she crushes the guy’s or high heels.
Stephen: Oh.
Rhys: Yeah. I was wondering actually in that scene whether or not the guy was happy she didn’t shoot him or not.
Stephen: You gotta wonder and
Rhys: rather be dead?
Stephen: I know she left one [00:34:00] of them, so he’s, yeah. That’s something it’s a story, the whole thing where she made ’em take off her clothes, it’s like at that point the character was like against men in general and is what it came across as. But I, I don’t blame her.
Some guy’s stalking her, Hey, she took care of business, so you gotta
Rhys: Absolutely, and I think that’s one of the, one of the things you can appreciate about Maxine, not the movie, the character is that. She has drive and she will d do what needs to be done. She doesn’t have any
Stephen: taking out her own father
Rhys: Yep. Yeah. Pretty gruesomely.
Stephen: And they called him the night stalker. Didn’t cold check, actually catch the night Stalker,
Rhys: So he actually wasn’t the night stalker. The Night Stalker was an actual serial killer in LA at the time. That moron got caught by a group of people. And the police [00:35:00] basically had to save his life because like the, it was gonna be crowd justice. They were kicking the shit out of that guy. Her father was basically just another serial killer in LA at the time, and his, he was, his modus opera operandi was adjacent to, and so the news would pick it up, as
Stephen: to get people to watch.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: So I got a, a fan theory here.
Rhys: Ooh.
Stephen: So
Rhys: another fan or you
Stephen: me fan. Me fan. Mia Goth was the main character in all three of ’em, but it wasn’t all three. Maxine in Pearl, she actually played Maxine’s mother. Or the no, I’m sorry. Backup the old lady. I’m sorry, a backup. The old lady, she played, the old lady that was in the house in X, sorry.
Yeah, she wasn’t the mother. My fault but it was the same actress, so they looked alike when they were younger. Here’s my thing, I think [00:36:00] that Pearl was actually possessed by a demon. And she wasn’t getting out to kill enough. So the demon jumped into Maxine and took over. And that’s why they looked alike.
And that’s why Pearl was so interested in Maxine, ’cause she knew the demon had jumped out of her into Maxine and Fate had drawn Maxine back to her in later in life.
Rhys: So it’s interesting you say that because I was listing, I was going through, in my head, I’m like, okay, so you have a seventies almost grindhouse slasher. That’s the first one. Then you have this technicolor, psychotic, stuck in your own head kind of thing with Pearl, and then you have this very gritty eighties. LA based movie for the third one. I was like, the one thing it’s missing, there’s no supernatural elements in any of them until Steve
Stephen: Yeah, there you go.
Rhys: now there [00:37:00] is
Stephen: maybe that’s, what he intended all along. It’s really a demon possession series.
Rhys: what the, one of the things I was thinking about is. At the end of Pearl. So Ty West is he doesn’t care what order you watch these in. He wanted to make them all standalone and they actually are,
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: and they’re good. They work so much better if you have the other ones to tie them to
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: 110%. But, like he was talking to one interviewer who was like, so I hadn’t seen any of them before I started, and I started by watching Maxine.
He’s that’s an odd choice, but okay, because of all of the, Maxine really is mostly tied into X. There’s actually flashbacks of X in Maxine, but so at the end of Pearl, Howard comes back from the war and he shows up in a house. Where his father-in-law is dead, his mother-in-law is [00:38:00] dead. They’re sitting at a table with a suckling pig that is just maggots have exploded out of it, and his wife comes outta the kitchen carrying a tray saying she’s so happy.
He’s there with a ridiculous rick disc grin on her face. That just doesn’t break. If you watch Pearl first, you are like, wow. I wonder what the hell happened there. When you watch x, Howard is the old man.
So he not only accepted what she did,
Stephen: He helped feed the alligator with the,
Rhys: he did, he would capture young people and put them in the basement for her. So he was betting the part which, okay, that’s bad. That’s. Kidnapping someone and chaining them up in your basement to be a sex slave for your wife is not good people. So I’m thinking about this and I’m like, but wait a second.
He was [00:39:00] in World War I and in X she says he fought in the Second World War ii. So he knowing. What she was and the weird fragility of her psyche left her alone a second time. And I’m just thinking what would’ve been more terrifying like being in the war or wondering what the hell you’re gonna come home to?
Stephen: right. Body stacked to the ceilings. Interesting. And he stayed with her, came back both times.
Rhys: And by the end, he is just as evil as she is. Really?
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Arguably.
Rhys: Yeah. His whole concern is his.
Stephen: Yeah. I love how, she’s, whatever, psycho old, and she’s so horny in that and he’s just the doctor said about my heart. She said, oh, it’ll be fine, dude. She’s killed how many people you.
Rhys: And that’s the crazy thing [00:40:00] too. That’s the whole T West foreshadow thing, right? Is saying at the start that he wants to make a movie that’s just gonna make the viewer’s eyes bulge right out of their skulls. And then he gets a pitchfork in the head and you see his body there and his eyeballs lying off to the side.
You had the whole thing with Bobby Lynn coming out with the alligator and then being eaten by an alligator. You had the whole thing with Howard saying, oh, my heart’s gonna be a thing. And what takes him out? He has a heart attack.
Stephen: Yeah,
Rhys: And he said something to somebody about being concerned that Pearl was gonna break her hip, and then she fires the shotgun, which throws her out of the building and she
Stephen: feet away.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: was a shotgun man. She must weighed what, 90 pounds?
Rhys: frail old lady, didn’t have it. Shouldered wasn’t braced. She was just going on impulse, but. It really was like he went through and he was just spelling out how everyone was gonna die. Like Ari her with the whole thing at the start of midsummer. Here’s the entire of midsummer in this [00:41:00] cartoon, and.
Stephen: One more thing about the alligator with my demon theory thing I forgot to mention this. So you know the scene where. Maxine jumps in the water and she’s swimming and she’s heading to the thing, and the alligator’s coming oh my God. If she was the demon possessed, she knew the alligator was there.
She jumped in to tease it and knew when she could get out safely. That was, I.
Rhys: that scene also brings to mind, and this is, thi this I think, is an issue for me between X and Pearl and Maxine, the cinematography in X and the cinematography in Pearl Top notch. The cinematography in Maxine is fine, but and I realize, you didn’t necessarily have the shot. Spelled out in Maxine where you would have, like when she’s in the lake, when she’s in the pond, that shot from the super elevated above it.
Phenomenal. And then in Pearl, she’s there and she’s getting the [00:42:00] scarecrow down. She holds him up. You have the horizon of corn and the scarecrow in that blue sky. Blue sky. I am just like, that is an amazing shot. And I can’t. For the life of me. Think of any specific shot in Maxine. No wait. The start of Maxine where she’s showing up in the hangar for her audition and there’s eh, and the door’s opening.
I’m like, that is like a really good symbol for how huge in Hollywood is. Yeah, that was a pretty good shot.
Stephen: It was, but also, it down dirtier scenes fit Hollywood too, possibly he was trying to do it on purpose, but honestly. I didn’t really get enough grit feel from it, but from Ty West, I would’ve expected even grittier type feel. She squished the guy’s testicle on alleyway floor.
So I don’t know how much more gritty we really want.
Rhys: Yeah. And. [00:43:00] So I’m horribly embarrassed. And I’m not, I keep talking about how I’m gonna go through and make corrections on the YouTube videos. I’m not gonna go through and correct this ’cause I’ve sent it a million times. GAO films, so they’re called that because they were wrapped in the yellow wrapper in Italy.
And Italian for yellow is G-I-A-L-L-O. It’s jello. So I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all this time. I’m not the only person. It’s not like I made that pronunciation up. But I heard Ty West talking about it and he pronounced it Jilo, and I’m like, I don’t think that’s right. And then I looked it up and yeah, it turns out he is right.
But like that whole argento feel at the, in Maxine, like when her roommate gets knifed. You got the leather, the mysterious leather gloved individual and like the bright red lights and like the over the top [00:44:00] blood and gore. When that guy just gets cut up in the video place, I’m like, yeah, Dario Argento could have definitely directed this scene.
It was really well done.
Stephen: Think about that too. The leather clad guy that was Maxine’s father.
Rhys: Yes.
Stephen: So he went to the strip club, put a quarter in to watch his daughter strip. How is that, the strip, later on it clicked and I was like, yeah, how much dis more disturbing can we get in these movies?
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: then the cop at the end of the first one, he was like, is like a damn horror movie here?
Or something like that. That was a funny line.
Rhys: And so that was my thought. So you have, not so much in X, but in Pearl you have a psychotic break where she’s on the dance she’s dancing and like just completely loses. It gets enraptured in the dance. And in Maxine you have the psychotic break where she’s on top of the Hollywood by the Hollywood sign and the helicopter’s there.
And I just kept thinking, legally, I’m wondering how she gets out of this. And I [00:45:00] think the easiest way for that to happen that female police officer had to live.
It, she was still alive when we saw her last. She had a cross jammed in her eye and she fell down a hill, but she was still alive. The other cop was dead.
So if you have her corroborating Maxine’s story from a legal standpoint, that pretty much should absolve her of anything that happened in that mansion that night. If that cop died though, that’s just a real mess. Everybody in this place is dead. There’s a shotgun with your fingerprints on it. A guy whose head’s been blown off and you’re the only survivor of this massacre.
Stephen: Of course. The whole fact that, the cops were telling her to put the gun down. She stood there for two minutes with her dad on the ground, then she shot him. Regardless, that might get you in a little bit of trouble ’cause he’s laying there defenseless and [00:46:00] you shot him with cops witnessing.
Rhys: Yeah, even if the other, if the two police officers in the mansion both died. If she got off of everything else that happened in there, they’re like, yeah, this, obviously this wasn’t you. You have ligature marks on your arms from where you’re tied up or something like that. They would still have her kind of dead to rights for just murdering her father, but extenuating circumstances, if the other officer is actually testifying, I think would’ve actually got her.
But. It’s like the end of Mama, where I’m like, oh, I wonder how this is gonna play out in the courts. You’re missing a kid. All these people around you are dead.
Stephen: which arguably a whole courtroom movie could be pretty horrific to a lot of people.
Rhys: Oh, for sure. sure.
Stephen: all right.
Rhys: If you haven’t seen these, you’re doing yourself a disservice. You should definitely watch ’em. And again, regardless of what kind of flavor you like, your horror, one of these is gonna hit for sure.
Stephen: Yeah, [00:47:00] and it’d probably be disturbing no matter what in certain parts. So have fun. If you’re looking for something that’s similar where it’s a trilogy that feed on each other that’s not as disturbing. Netflix’s Fear Street Series covers that. It’s a trilogy that feeds on itself and is not quite as disturbing.
Rhys: Yeah, and I’m not saying this is a knock to Netflix, but it’s a very Netflix trilogy
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: where it, it’s like it’s made for a more general audience.
Stephen: Yeah it’s very light horror. It was fun. They were fun.
Rhys: It’s, I think it’s a step, I don’t know, I wouldn’t compare it to Stranger Things ’cause they’re two very different things. But like all of them read young literature kind of thing.
Ya stories Ty West are not, his, and, I think. I have to appreciate the way that he completely embraces any project that he’s in. I have to appreciate the [00:48:00] level of detail that he puts into it. I have to appreciate his love for the industry. All of that stuff is amazing. And honestly, about the only criticism I can level towards Ty West is that he speaks really fast.
He’s a fast talker. If you hear him in interviews, he’s just talking a mile a minute
Stephen: I will say this about season five in general, overall director rehash. We had four seasons with, I don’t know if we had too many repeats anyway of directors. It was a lot of new stuff. A lot of directors I’m sure a lot of people hadn’t heard of. There were a lot I had never really heard of and we’ve talked about a lot of directors and we threw it all in the season five with what are some other movies these guys have done?
’cause some of ’em have been fantastic. So if we have accomplished nothing else in these five seasons. We may be introduced some new directors in movies to some people and got some favorites. I love Ty West. I love you mentioned like Adam Green and Gardner. I’ve come to like these guys because of us doing these and looking into the movies [00:49:00] deeper than just watching something on a Saturday afternoon.
So I hope we’ve done that for some other people. They’ve found some things they like.
Rhys: Absolutely. And I’m gonna point out, and, like my daughter, this wouldn’t work for her ’cause she doesn’t rewatch anything, but, and that’s like a rule for her. So it’s not like me saying, oh, she never rewatch. She’s like a rule. She won’t rewatch anything but. The more you watch these tho, these shows, the same ones, especially from really good directors, the more you pull out of them.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: And exactly. So like you can sit there and you can watch X and then Pearl and then Maxine, you can watch ’em back to back. It’ll carry quite a bit of weight by the time you’re done. But if you go back and watch it another time, there’s so many other things you’re gonna be lifting outta that just to make it that much richer of an experience for you.
Stephen: We mentioned Wizard of Oz and there’s classic films that we’ve heard No Psycho was mentioned and all that. Yeah. I could [00:50:00] very much see this trilogy 30 years, 40 years from now being one of those. Oh, this is a classic from, the early two thousands you gotta watch.
Rhys: Yeah, Zach be will be a director and he’ll be like this classic trilogy by Ty West and all those guys will be like, oh yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And then we’re probably going to be way more popular in 40 years than we are right now
Rhys: That’s right. We couldn’t get much less popular,
Stephen: wow. Are you talking personally or for the podcast? I’m not sure There all so there’s season five. So we got next, exciting season six. What’s our theme for season six?
Rhys: So our theme for season six actually harkens back to the first five seasons because there is one thing every director from the past five seasons all have in common. Do you know what it is?
Stephen: Horror movies.
Rhys: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Stephen: So two things. Alright. What’s the second thing?
Rhys: They’re all men,
Stephen: [00:51:00] Yes, they
Rhys: every one of them. Season six, we have 10 movies lined up, all directed by women.
Stephen: And we’re not doing this to try and be inclusive. It really should be. We’ve had so many great women doing movies nowadays. We weren’t purposefully trying to ignore them. It just so happens it turned out this way. And I love that we’re gonna do this. And the movies aren’t being picked to.
Treat ’em differently or anything. We’re, these are horror movies. It just so happens it’s a woman director, which we don’t have a lot of in horror movies as much. Women don’t like horror quite as much there hopefully will be some new movies and new directors for people as we go through it.
Rhys: Oh, I am sure there will, and I am gonna say this. If you have a list of women director horror movies, women directed horror movies, there are no light titles in this. There are no horror comedies in season [00:52:00] six. They’re all pretty intense,
Stephen: Nice.
Rhys: so buckle up for that,
Stephen: Yeah. And also another shout out real quick. I’m signed up to go to the Sinister Horror Fest again in October, and they show movies at night. They are showing Ash versus the Evil Dead, and Tucker and Dale this time.
Rhys: Wow.
Stephen: be a fun, along with a lot of horror shorts they show independent films and they show award-winning horror shorts.
And they also show some old classics but they also show independents. So there are usually a couple local independent horror films shown and they are also there. So maybe we should do a couple bonus episodes of some bonus or local horror independent filmmakers that we’ve met and stuff.
Rhys: That would be awesome if you have if you have a group that would be,
Stephen: they go and sit at Sinister Horror Fest for a weekend hoping people will talk to them and get their movies. So if I said, Hey, we watched your movie. We did this, we’d like to talk to you. I’m sure we could [00:53:00] get a couple of them to say, oh, yeah, that sounds like fun.
Rhys: That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea.
Stephen: not, maybe not a whole season, but maybe just throw an extra episode like we do with our Halloween Hons.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. Or like a bonus episode kind of thing.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. All right, so there’s season five wrap up. We’re done,
Rhys: Awesome.
Stephen: all man. I’ll talk to you later.
Rhys: Yeah.
