You’d think a generislasher with a generititle like Psycho Killer would land on the most generic generistreamer out there (lookin’ at you, Netflix), but no, it somehow got a wide theatrical release by 20th Century Studios, then funneled to Hulu for your (dis)pleasure. Somewhat interesting story behind this one: It was originally scripted by Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker in the mid-2000s before it was dustbinned and passed around for a couple of decades (Fred Durst and Eli Roth both touched it at some point) and pulled out for longtime film and TV producer Gavin Polone (credits include everything from Zombieland to Gilmore Girls) to direct, his first feature effort. Curious that it has such a tortured history, since the only question I had while watching it was, why bother?
The Gist: Hey, at least he uses a turn signal as this sullen goon pulls over to murder a cop in cold blood. It’s just common courtesy. The cop was married to another cop, Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian), who arrived at the scene in time to witness her hubs get a bullet through the heart and become the latest statistic of the Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers), who’s making his way cross-country leaving bodies and painted-in-blood Satanic markings in his wake. He speaks in a near-distorted low-register rumble, clomps around with heavy footsteps that echo from here to eternity and we never see his face because it’s behind either a pair of dark aviators or a head covering that’s a combo of a gas mask and Hannibal Lecter’s quasi-grinning-death’s-head jaw piece. He eats pills in handfuls and sleeps in the closet, cuddling his teddy shotgun. I bet his mommy was mean to him.
Well, he created an enemy on the roadside that day. Officer Jane exhales after the funeral, pees on a pregnancy test to confirm that she is indeed with child, then gets to chasing the ol’ Slasheroo. Warning: Do not expect further character development from this person. The movie cuts between the whatnots and goings-on between Jane and the Satanic Slasher, the former partaking of painfully simplistic policework and the latter sledgehammering a teenager in the face or stalking and killing a pharmacist so he can burgle more oxy. Slashy is super into the devil, so he leaves pentagrams and phrases like “OPEN THE GATES” slopped on crime-scene walls. Jane googles “OPEN THE GATES” and finds a thread related to a Satanic pointy-logo heavy metal band and pulls on it. Eventually, their paths will cross and there will be some heck to pay. Some very boring heck, maybe the boringest.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? At least the Terrifier movies are potently disgusting in their no-frills displays of bloodletting.
Performance Worth Watching: The phrase “Malcolm McDowell as a high grand supreme Satanic magus” carries so much potential that goes 98 percent unfulfilled here.
Sex And Skin: What’s an occult slasher flick without a flurry of ax murders of totally naked people during a Satanic orgy? It’s NOTHING, that’s what it is.
Our Take: Even for a nuts-and-bolts slasher, Psycho Killer is some thin gruel, some watery tea, some bloody weak sauce. Polone shows base competence in his visual storytelling, but the superlatives end there. In the film’s steadfast refusal to give us anything of interest, it hacks and clunks among gnarly but unimaginative kill-happy setpieces gussied up with circa-’87 Satanic Panic imagery, and the dull mechanical hum of the Officer Jane plot pushing the story forward. The two primary threads bump against each other and separate and bump together again, drumming up sub-minimal suspense for a deeply diseased ending rife with arbitrary nonsense. Even horror wackos In It For The Kills, Man will shrug at this sloppy arrangement of bog-standard knife-goes-in-guts-come-out slayings.
The only chunk of the film that threatens to show a pulse involves McDowell’s clan of occultists, but any opportunities for colorful character embellishments or a little thematic oomph — there’s the briefest of mentions of who’s the most devoted believer in Old Scratch — are avoided like a plate of free cookies at the bubonic plague convention. You got your pentagrams, your sixsixsixes, your Sigils of Baphomet, but no Geraldo to stir the sensational controversies of a Luciferian devotee’s nasty little kill spree. Metaphorically speaking, that is. Hey, at least Venom, the pioneers of the mighty art of black metal, earn some residuals for “In League with Satan,” a raucous soundtrack ditty that jolted me from the open-eyed nap-like stupor this movie inspired. Venom rules, Psycho Killer drools.
Our Call: Psycho Killer is in league with ass. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.