phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2022

X



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2022
Runtime: 1h 45m
Country: USA, Canada
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: In 1979, a group of young filmmakers set out to make an adult film in rural Texas, but when their reclusive, elderly hosts catch them in the act, the cast find themselves fighting for their lives.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Simultaneously a period slasher flick, and a subversion and deconstruction of the slasher flick. Characters filming a porno would normally be the most lascivious group to be killed off quickly, but in this case they're the nicest people having totally consensual fun. The usual horror tropes aren't deployed until late in the game and then the movie just relishes in them. For horror fans, this is a movie that will delightfully toy with your expectations.


Outside Reviews:

Abby Olcese
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

The film crew's "let's-put-on-a-show" ethos highlights the plucky, hard-fought joys of low-budget filmmaking, recalling movies like "Ed Wood" or "Dolemite is My Name." When the focus switches to out-and-out horror, the source of "X's" enthusiasm and devotion also changes. Instead of the characters being energized by the ad-hoc creative process, it's West himself who radiates excitement, nearly becoming an off-camera character as "X" gleefully picks off its filmmaker proxies one by one.


Todd Gilchrist
Ti West works more genre-manipulating magic with X

X is like a turducken of overplayed storytelling tropes—in the porn movie, the traveling salesman who encounters a farmer's buxom daughters after his car breaks down, and in the actual movie, a group of oversexed young people who venture out to a remote location and start poking around where they shouldn't. But West possesses a unique ability to utilize the rhythms of a familiar narrative or stylistic blueprint and contemporize them so that they don't feel like a retread of the films that came before. Here he exploits the audience's knowledge of sex travelogues and hillbilly horror to first make them laugh and then undermine their expectations.