We all know that there are bad, worthless, even nearly irredeemable films that fail on almost every front, but it’s rare to witness a movie truly fall apart at the seams in real time as it goes on. A complete slow destruction of all the elements that make a film tick, from an increasingly absurdist screenplay to technical aspects that look increasingly fake—essentially the film equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion.
Unfortunately, Psycho Killer is a near-perfect example of this endeavor, and it’s even more baffling when you realize the studio and talent behind it. You would expect a movie written by Andrew Kevin Walker, of an actual good serial killer mystery, Se7en, and directed by cemented producer Gavin Polone, to at least be more interesting, but the screenplay is Psycho Killer’s most perplexing attribute. From the laughably bad CGI-covered kills to its simultaneously incomprehensible and rushed central mystery, it seems clear that this film is the product of an over-edited production that unfolds into a complete disaster, not even having the decency of being an entertaining one by the time it reaches its end.
The film starts with an intriguing enough setup, opening with State trooper Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell) witnessing her husband and partner officer get gunned down on the road by the titular “Psycho killer” (James Preston Rogers), better known across the country as The Satanic Slasher. The slasher has been murdering people seemingly at random within a straight path of destruction, ransacking pharmacies for drugs, painting pentagrams in blood, and hiding out in motels as he formulates his sickening plan to essentially be known as the ultimate satanist.
Jane has obviously been struggling to come to grips with her husband’s murder and thinks each day about what she should’ve done to prevent it on the road that day, and she soon sees the only way she’ll get any sort of closure is if she takes the investigation head-on and finds the killer herself. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse hunt of sorts as Jane uncovers the deeper meaning of the slasher’s satanic motivations, as she uncovers a mental depravity that’s deeply terrifying and will send shockwaves across the nation.
It admittedly is a noble effort to just craft a solid serial killer mystery surrounding such dark subject matter, and it seemed that having Kevin Walker as screenwriter was a great addition to aid in that, so it’s insane just how inept the script here is on every level. Every piece of dialogue is so artificial, characters spout constant exposition dumps and random reasoning for things that happen within the mystery, and all the satanic panic ideas behind the killer’s actions, the film throws at the wind never sticks at all; everyone in this film speaks like a robot.
God bless Georgina Campbell, as we know she is a more than capable performer from Barbarian fame, but even she can’t save how stale both the writing and her characterization are here. Her arc here is stagnant, just continuously running in circles around the same idea of her blaming the death of her husband on herself, and the people around her reiterating that without expanding on it in the slightest, and somehow, this is the least of the movie’s problems.
If we focus on the actual serial killer himself, it becomes even more apparent how badly the film misses the mark. Everything surrounding his satanic “plan” is completely incomprehensible. Not only is there never an ounce of believability to how he’s able to pull off his murders, but the satanic slasher’s kills aren’t even remotely interesting in the slightest. There are numerous points throughout the film’s back half where it dips into straight-up unintentional camp once the slasher meets up with Mr. Pendleton’s (Malcolm McDowell) goofy ass satanic cult, all while the killer has entirely ADR voice lines that sound like a discount Venom, but the film continues to take itself completely seriously, leading to a tonal nightmare that borders on being laughable.
After a string of kills that have outstandingly bad CGI and death sequences that feel more in place within a Final Destination film than in this film’s world, we get a complete and utter embarrassment of a third act that makes the previous incoherent stretches of the film’s narrative seem tame in comparison. It would not be a joke to say that every other line throughout this section seems ADR’d, even Georgina Campbell’s final face-palm-worthy quip of “Go To Hell Psycho,” is awkwardly shoved into the movie’s climax, fully cementing the complete unraveling of something I couldn’t even believe was a finished product.
It’s rare to see something as incomprehensible in every element, even within other awful movies, but it’s at times almost impressive just how much of a mess Psycho Killer really is. Its befuddling narrative will leave you clueless about anything it’s trying to accomplish, it’s overly self-serious to the point of becoming laughable, and it doesn’t even have the decency of having a few good kill scenes or, really, any memorable scenes at all. It’s a movie so awful that the only mystery you’ll want to solve is how something conceptually promising could be butchered this badly.
Psycho Killer is currently playing in theaters courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
It's a movie so awful that the only mystery you’ll want to solve is how something conceptually promising could be butchered this badly.
Lover of film writing about film. Member of the Dallas Fort-Worth Critics Association. The more time passes, the more the medium of movies has become deeply intertwined with who I am.
