Psycho Killer: Qu'est-ce Que C'est?

There doesn’t seem to be much upside for Gavin Polone to start a directing career now. At 62, the veteran producer has been making big movies (Panic Room, Zombieland) for a long time, without necessarily having to put in long shooting days freezing on the side of a snowy highway.

This is where his directorial debut, Psycho Killer, opens. In a great, dread-inducing scene, the hulking, Aviator-sunglasses wearing title character (James Preston Rogers) gets pulled over by a highway patrolman. It’s a Fargo-esque slow burn that sets up the story and characters with economy and style.

Following the patrolman’s inevitable splattering, his widow, fellow cop Jane Archer (Barbarian breakout Georgina Campbell), becomes obsessed with finding and stopping him. Meanwhile, the psycho continues his eastbound journey, taking every opportunity to kill at random while gathering supplies for a mass casualty event, all while wearing an insectoid mask.

Unfortunately it soon becomes clear there isn’t much going on inside this creepy-mask movie’s head. Even by genre standards, the characters’ motivations and movements feel like connect-the-dots for an unraveling cookie cutter plot. What could be potent themes— pharmaceutical psychosis, cop identity crises, nuclear armageddon—evaporate into bits of window dressing. Confusingly, Psycho Killer (the character’s name in the credits) is constantly referred to in the film’s Natural Born Killers-esque media reports as “the Satanic Slasher.”

The film’s marquee creative name belongs to screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, famed for his genre-defining script Se7en. His buzzy return to serial killer horror, Psycho Killer has been kicking around since 2007. In a relevant bit of lore, Fred Durst was attached to direct in 2009. For an A-list project that’s been in development for so long, the storytelling screams first draft.

One could imagine the overwhelming box office success of 2024’s Longlegs as the jumpstart to finally get cameras rolling on this production. In its surreally disjointed plotting, total lack of characterization, and Satanic panic tropes seemingly designed to scare toddlers, Psycho Killer has much in common with Osgood Perkins’ recent hackworks.

Any points given are for style and vibe, which tend toward camp. One scene features Psycho Killer (I mean the Satanic Slasher… whatever) in full mask and trenchcoat regalia, standing next to a golf cart in broad daylight. This is inherently funny, and nothing about Polone’s approach to the scene indicates otherwise. Later in the film, Archer makes a connection involving a wannabe Satanic metal band, Demon Fist. To prove it to the snooty FBI agent who won’t let her help with the case, she waves one of the band’s garish album covers in his face. 

The requisite genre gore element is mostly accomplished by rote means (gun, ax, 18-wheeler) and weightless CGI splatter. I counted exactly one creative, sick kill. (You’ll know it if you see it.) This is a terrible disappointment; Walker made his name by fitting no less than seven wildly creative murders into his breakout film. A more extreme and novel approach would have put this over the top for the target audience. 

Psycho Killer wants to huff the fumes of the 1990s golden age of super-dark killer thrillers, where even the also-rans (one literally named Copycat) had something to hang their hat on. From its name on down, Polone’s maybe-one-off directorial effort has a certain braindead charm that earns its mercifully brief 92 minutes. But the moviegoing public is long overdue for a big-screen serial killer renaissance. We deserve much better than we’ve been getting.

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