PSYCHO KILLER:
IF YOU SEE THIS “KILLER” PLAYING AT A THEATER NEAR YOU, RUN AWAY, RUN FAR AWAY!
By Nico Beland
Movie Review: * out of 4
20TH CENTURY STUDIOS
Georgina Campbell in Psycho Killer
A cop goes on a mission to hunt down a notorious serial killer after her husband was murdered in Psycho Killer, a slasher thriller film by Gavin Polone (8mm, Secret Window, Zombieland 1 and 2) in his directorial debut from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, The Killer) and produced by Roy Lee (Barbarian, Weapons, The Long Walk). I didn’t have any expectations going into this. I saw the poster in a movie theater lobby a few times, and I only saw the trailer once in theaters in front of Send Help, barely thought about it until its official release.
Well, I didn’t have any expectations with Barbarian when I went to see that, and it became one of my favorite films from 2022, so maybe Psycho Killer would do the same…IT’S SHIT! Yeah, I’m not sugar-coating this review. Psycho Killer is a terrible movie despite tons of talented people working on it. The film is a very standard slasher movie that gets even stupider and more absurd as it progresses.
The film follows State Trooper Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell-Barbarian, The Watchers, Cold Storage), who witnesses her husband get murdered by a serial killer known as the Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers), who has very bizarre and frightening methods of killing his victims and leaving his mark. Jane goes rogue to hunt the Satanic Slasher down, and as she gets closer in her journey, she begins to realize the killer’s motives and agenda are more terrifying and demented than anyone could have imagined.
The film also stars Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, Halloween 1 and 2 (2007/2009), Metalocalypse) as Mr. Pendleton, Logan Miller (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, Love, Simon, Escape Room 1 and 2) as Marvin, Grace Dove (The Revenant, How It Ends, Alaska Daily) as Agent Becky Collins, and Nigel Shawn Williams (The Famous Jett Jackson, John Q., The Jane Show) as Jane’s father.
Overall, Psycho Killer is a lazy, by-the-numbers slasher film with absolutely nothing going for it…outside of pure lunacy with its plot. I cannot believe the writer of Se7en and The Killer wrote this movie because it feels like the script was generated by computers and AI, hits all the genre checkmarks, and doesn’t do anything unique or special with them.
Aside from Georgina Campbell’s Jane, there are barely any characters in this film that she can work off of or interact with, many of which are just cameos with no real development. Hell, the movie doesn’t even develop its protagonist that well outside of “Well, her husband got murdered, so I’m supposed to feel something.” even though Georgina Campbell mostly plays her role fine, there’s just nothing about her character to keep you invested in her hunt for her husband’s killer.
Even the killer isn’t anything special; he’s just some big, dirty guy with tattoos, a voice that sounds like a voice changer someone would do, but it’s just his natural speaking voice, and a mask that makes him look like the miner from My Bloody Valentine or the killer from Heart Eyes minus the light-up eyes. Conceptually, the Satanic Slasher could have been a new horror icon as a killer who’s a Satanist and overall motive is to “Open the Gates of Hell” to appease Satan via causing a large-scale murder-suicide with a nuclear power plant, but because of how the film is executed, he fails to leave an impression and just looks like any other Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers killer.
Malcolm McDowell as this Satanist cult leader is kinda fun when he’s introduced because he is hamming it up and having a ball; it’s not much, but at least I’ll remember him and his completely insane cult. McDowell is so good, he can even make a film as awful as Mr. Magoo a little more credible because of his involvement (This movie is technically better than that in case anyone was wondering).
I was even let down by the kills in this movie; not a single one was impactful, despite the film being rated R and having blood and gore. The problems are CGI blood, shitty lighting, and unnecessary uses of slow-motion to the point where I started questioning if Zack Snyder took over as director for a day to direct this particular sequence. Leave it to this film to completely fail at the one thing people look for in a slasher movie, and this one wasn’t even watered down to PG-13.
There actually were two deaths that I found hilarious, and I don’t know whether or not they were intentionally funny, one involving a truck that was so outlandish and cartoony I laughed my ass off and another in a church confession booth where the killer stabs a priest in the neck with a sharp pipe and starts slurping his blood as it gushes through the pipe. Absolutely ridiculous shit that got a couple laughs out of me, not enough to excuse the rest of the film.
The plot is your typical rogue cop VS serial killer storyline and hits all the tropes of that kind of narrative. But then the film decides to make death metal music the driving point of the killer’s antics with an in-universe metal band’s albums, song titles, and lyrics as clues for his motives, which might have been clever in a more competent movie, but it’s so stupid here, and they don’t even go all-out with it.
If you ask me, the film should have taken the Korn Halloween episode of South Park route and actually have the metal band in the movie helping the police officer take down the killer, even my dumb ideas are sounding better than any of the shit projected on the screen.
Yeah, Psycho Killer is a wretched, uninspired slasher movie and a miserable directorial debut for Gavin Polone. Hopefully, his next film, whenever that may be, will finally showcase his true talents as a director and completely blow this waste of time out of the water because at this point, you’re better off just doing a double-feature of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and David Fincher’s The Killer.
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