No killer ending: Finale a bloody letdown as the X factor is missing

MaXXXine is a bit of a letdown after that one-two punch, or maybe slash. It's a sequel to X and while you could watch it as a standalone movie, you'll get more out of it if you've seen the earlier films.

It's set in the mid-1980s, the time of Ronald Reagan, Brat Pack movies, and satanic panic, and music on the soundtrack ranges from ZZ Top to Kim Carnes' Bette Davis Eyes. Having survived the ill-fated 1979 attempt to make a porn movie in rural Texas (as seen in X), Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) has become a star, at least as far as the adult film industry is concerned, and even has a personalised number plate (see title). She keeps busy, working on the movies by day and in live peep shows at night. But she wants bigger things (no pun intended).

Maxine lands the lead role in a horror sequel, The Puritan II, which might not sound like much, but as she notes, a lot of stars got their start in horror - Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Brooke Shields (Alice Sweet Alice) among them. Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13th) is another, but we'll get to him in a minute.

A videotape from the aborted porn shoot suddenly turns up and, puzzled, she asks her friend Leon (Moses Sumney), who works in a video store - remember those? - to see if he can find out where it came from (remember, this is the pre-internet age).

That's one mystery, but a more ominous one is the identity of a silent gloved figure who's been keeping tabs on her. Could he be the much-reported Night Stalker who preys on young women by night, leaving them dead and branded with pentagrams?

A couple of people Maxine knows have been victims but she's more concerned about her new movie than helping the detectives on the case (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale, who provide lame comedy relief).

Then there's the sleazy private investigator John Labat (Bacon, hamming it up with a thick New Orleans accent and gold teeth) who says if she doesn't meet with his client, her past crimes will be exposed.

MaXXXine isn't boring, but it feels like it could have been so much better. An opening quote from Bette Davis ("In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star") suggests there will be some effective satire of the movie business. There were opportunities for this with the pretentious horror movie director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debecki), but they aren't explored. And Maxine's self-absorption and drive to succeed aren't made very compelling. The fine cast is mostly wasted though Giancarlo Esposito scores as Maxine's very helpful agent and lawyer.

We see quite a bit of the Universal Studios backlot which feels like product placement for the studio tour. When Labat is lumbering after Maxine around those oft-seen locales, the effect is broadly comic but beyond the interest for movie buffs and adds nothing to the story.

And there are the movie references - some stylistic, recalling Italian giallo and Brian DePalma's flashily made horror movies, some more direct.

Bacon spends a chunk of the movie with a bandage on his nose like Jack Nicholson as another private investigator in Chinatown; a would-be assailant resembles Buster Keaton in face and garb (and suffers a particularly nasty, and gratuitously depicted, fate).

But none of them add up to much and it's hard not to feel viewers should be watching the movies that this one nods to instead - and its predecessors in the X series.