X 2022 * * Stars

X FACTORED 

"Hollywood here we come". Uh not quite. More like somewhere outside of sultry Houston, Texas. That's where the events in 2022's X (my latest review) happen. "Get the cameras rolling, get the action going". Indeed.

Not really scary and not avant-garde in a perverted sort of way, X takes place in the late 1970s and is filmed like a "Me Decade" movie. We're talking long shots, wide shots, zoom ins, zoom outs, crosses, and a bit of the grainy. I mean if you're gonna make a flick set in 1979, you might as well have the audience be taken aback.

Ti West (X's veteran helmer) knows where to put the camera and can think in cuts. Oh and the classic rock soundtrack is decent. It's not West's direction that's the culprit, it's his victim characters who try to be witty and likable but end up being rather uncouth. Then there's the antagonists played by two senior citizens who were probably in their 90s. You'd have to believe that this husband and wife team could dispatch people like Jason Voorhees, be able to snap to it, and still have a little nookie on the side (which they do). This whole premise in X is quite misguided and that nookie image is something I'll probably never be able to shake (ugh).

Distributed by A24 and actually filmed in Queenstown, New Zealand (I didn't pick up on that), X is about a group of young filmmakers who set out to make a pornographic pic only to be hunted down by a couple of kooky killers who live near their shooting location. Masked locales begot, you can basically call X Super 8 for the adult film industry or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the AARP crowd. Its movie within a movie stature is neither innovative nor original enough. "X out".

Written by Jesse Burleson