Michael Fairbanks
The posters for Psycho Killer tout the film’s creative pedigree above images of “The Satanic Slasher” posing in his gas mask. “From The Twisted Writer of Se7en and 8MM and the Producers of Barbarian and a Producer of Weapons.” That sure is a list of people who have sat in a room with iconic filmmakers. It is understandable why these folks fear that Psycho Killer will not sell on its own merit. This is, in no uncertain terms, one of the most pathetic attempts at a slasher franchise launch that I have witnessed in my lifetime. Plenty of subpar horror movies fail at being scary. No harm no foul. Psycho Killer is delusionally convinced that it is dripping with the grimy, transgressive style that could induct first time filmmaker Gavin Polone into the same class as David Fincher, Zach Cregger and Joel Schumacher. Instead, his endless string of failed set pieces only draw tension out of potent secondhand embarrassment.
We follow police officer Jane Archer (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) as she endeavors to hunt down The Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers from Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) after he guns down her fellow officer/husband Mike (Playing with Fire‘s Stephen Adekolu) in front of her during a traffic stop. This killer has been traveling across America for weeks, stealing weapons and drugs while taking dozens of lives. There’s a clear eastbound path for Jane to follow and as she looks for clues and occasionally encounters The Slasher in person, she starts to uncover his dastardly scheme.
Gavin Polone devotes a great deal of time in Psycho Killer to following The Satanic Slasher around as he executes his routine and then rests. There’s way more resting than you might expect. Whenever he’s tired, he seems to always be able to find a crappy motel to load all of his killing gear into for the night. We spend our first extended beat with him at one of these sleepovers as we watch him shove his head into that mask, curl up into the room’s small closet and cuddle with his shotgun. How unhinged and edgy of him. He isn’t silent, although I wish he was. James Preston Rogers’ attempt at an unsettling voice sounds like an overzealous film school freshman doing an impression of Tom Hardy’s Venom that has become far too linked to his ability to connect with others. It is so clearly straining to be scary that if The Satanic Slasher wasn’t quickly dispatching his victims, they’d probably start laughing at him.
The kills are painfully tame. 20th Century Studios may sign off on a palatable amount of gore but this Psycho Killer can never truly let his freak out. Most of the encounters involve our guy rolling up to his next victim, somehow sneaking up on them despite his enormous form and heavy breathing, and then hitting them once really hard with a sharp object as blood spatters. This lack of action is particularly egregious during the film’s centerpiece massacre. The Satanic Slasher visits a compound of satanists led by Mr. Pendleton (A Clockwork Orange legend Malcolm McDowell, cashing a check). After an awkward dinner, he stays the night and then decides the next morning that it’s time to bail and leave no survivors. He takes his ax and in the middle of the group’s orgy, cuts them down one by one. Each victim receives no more than one slow motion slash with a spurt of CGI blood and viscera to go with it. This stilted choreography combined with the atrocious framing is transcendently incompetent, and that’s before he seemingly teleports out of the building to his car in just a couple of edits upon noticing that Jane has arrived to take him on.
Jane’s half of the film is somehow even duller. Georgina Campbell showed promise in Barbarian but she’s very stilted here. Early on, we see Jane rebuke a therapist’s attempt to get her to start coping with the trauma of losing Mike. She proceeds to not express a single emotion throughout the rest of a film that would’ve thrived if infused with some feral anger. If anything, Campbell is transparently disappointed with the material. She’s not even able to convincingly muster fear of The Satanic Slasher even when he’s clobbering her during their first tussle in one of his motel rooms.
None of the other humdrum characters Jane comes across give her anything to work with either. They’d be stilted even in a network procedural. There just isn’t much of a mystery to be solved here. All that is unknown is exactly where along the travel path The Satanic Slasher will strike next and what exactly his blood drawn images on the motel walls with satanic and heavy metal influences are indicating about his overall MO.
Perhaps if Rob Zombie directed Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay, Psycho Killer could’ve been the trashy trip it so clearly fancies itself to be. Cliches are not the issue. Recently, Longlegs was able to wring something distinctly unhinged around essentially the same setup. This needed more assured filmmaking that could somewhat ground us in Jane’s half of the story before exploding into a manic nightmare during The Satanic Slasher’s outings. Instead, it sags between its two lame leads before finally allowing them a climatic battle inside a specific landmark straight out of GI:Joe. It even has the audacity to tease a sequel. Maybe in that one The Satanic Slasher will get to use two consecutive attacks against his victims.
