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Review

This movie is so Texas Chainsaw Massacre coded. Like everywhere you look it’s just TCM, Pearl has like flashes of TCM with the dinner scene but this movie is TCM the porn film-makers edition: ‘This time with no chainsaws’. All jokes aside you could tell that this movie was meant to look like a late 70s early 80s slasher a la specifically TCM and I think it worked out well.

This movie is about a group of film-makers/sex workers who are setting out to create the greatest porn film ever which is going to put them on the map. They rent out a house on the edge of an old couple’s property in order to have a farm setting to film it in. The old couple ends up killing all but the star Maxine who Pearl obsesses over due to their similar appearance and goals and the movie ends with Maxine escaping, still chasing after her fame, after killing Pearl and leaving Howard for dead.

This movie does a good job of emulating the old grimy slashers that it’s borne from and it retains that feeling well. However well loved this era of horror is, I have mixed feelings. I tend to really enjoy these movies but they don’t really transcend as some of my favorites and I feel like that’s exactly how this film lands for me. I really enjoyed this movie but I don’t think I’ll reflect on it as particularly showstopping or that it’ll be a go to for me.

I also think this movie suffers slightly from the weight of expectations from me considering I liked Pearl as much as I did and I watched it first. However that’s not to say that it’s not good because it definitely is.

I love TCM and so I was giddy seeing all the references to it. Realizing that the entrance to Pearl’s house was the same as the TCM house and that Maxine’s outfit was a parallel to a TCM outfit and that the EP guy kinda looked like Drayton, it just worked for me and my lizard brain kept going, “OMG A TCM REFERENCE” but also if you’ve never watched TCM it wasn’t anything that would get in the way or be confusing, it was subtle and l loved it.

The one leg up that I think this movie has on Pearl is I think it has very innovative and cool shots that pearl kinda lacked for me, in this case it wasn’t something I noticed til I saw them in this movie and realize that there wasn’t many in Pearl. The shot were Maxine is swimming and the gator is coming after her was literally so gorgeous and I absolutely adored it.

I also think this movie was more unsettling and ‘scary’ than Pearl. Pearl the movie was very horrific but I think this movie has a greater tension and any time that older Pearl is on screen I just felt so nervous and disturbed which worked to great effect.

Pearl the character was the absolute worst in the best way throughout this movie. She gave me the heebee jeebies and man did she make this movie so fucking hard to watch, literally everything she does is just so uncomfortable and damn did she make the horror of this movie so much more real.

Other than her though I feel like the only real character in this movie was Maxine, the rest of the characters felt much closer to the traditional paper thin cast you would find in these type of movies back then which meant I felt more meh about their circumstances. Maxine felt like a full character but I just didn’t feel super connected to her and her story though I did think she worked really well as a parallel to Pearl the character.

I think the kills were done well in this movie and were pretty shocking in nature but it also felt more par for the course considering the genre that this is emulating but I didn’t have any real qualms with any of the kills.

At the end of the day I think my thoughts about this movie can be summed up with the idea that I didn’t really have any issues with this film but at the same time it’s not a movie that I’m going to think about in my day to day life.