It’s just possible that writer-director Ti West is just a hair too meta for his own good — at least, judging by the concluding chapter of his X trilogy. Because what he seems to have done is to make a crummy, if gorgeous, ‘80s-style slasher pic, set, naturally, in the ‘80s, and chock full of that decade’s concerns over crumbling public morals, satanic cults, and psycho killers stalking the city streets. Why crummy? Because it almost entirely forgets that it’s supposed to be scary as well as sleazy, gripping as well as gory, visceral as well as violent, etc. Instead of a scream queen final girl who must find a way to rise above her fears and face her demons, we get star Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) as a badass blonde ball-busting bitch who refuses to accept anything less than the life she deserves. (The one scene in which she seems truly afraid feels like it belongs in a different film, perhaps the one it references.) She’s gonna be a movie star, her porno background be damned, and she’s so sure of it that she convinces director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) to cast her in the followup to her surprise horror hit The Puritan. Bender is maybe the worst part of the film, full of basic blather about the secret seriousness of horror flicks and the hidden hypocrisies of the righteous. It’s bad enough that it might be parody, and the same goes for the utterly incoherent Big Baddie who turns out to be behind the ritual killings that have all Los Angeles on edge. So maybe that’s what’s really going on here, and maybe that’s why we get all the jokey references to showbiz — a Buster Keaton impersonator getting called Buster, etc. And maybe, just maybe, the film’s final shot serves as a frightening rebuke to all that comes before. At least it’s something to think about after all the lovely neon nonsense. (2024) — Matthew Lickona