Psycho Killer Review – The Late Satanic Series Is Devilishly Boring | Horror movies

WWhen a script passes through multiple hands over a period of nearly 20 years, one assumes it must have something magnetic enough to keep it within the Hollywood ecosystem and out of the trash. Of course, there’s also supposedly something a bit cursed about it as well, but when it’s finally made, the curiosity factor is pretty high. Psycho Killer, written by Seven’s Andrew Kevin Walker in the mid-2000s, has had more or less its share of drama over the years. In 2009, Fred Durst was hired to direct. In 2010, Eli Roth was scheduled to produce. In 2011, production was scheduled to begin. In 2015, it was supposed to receive German funding. But each version hit a snag, and it took until 2023 for the film to finally be produced.

Three years later, it was finally released by the 20th Disney Festival, with producer Gavin Polon making his directorial debut, an answer to the question “Why this?” It quietly reaches more than 1,000 cinemas.

Walker’s innovative screenplay for Seven didn’t lead to the career many expected (his screenplay for 8mm was so fragmentary that he was disowned; he had a role in 2010’s ill-fated Wolfman; and his coronavirus-shot crime thriller Windfall was a flop) but perhaps in the immediate aftermath of his 1995 debut, another serial killer thriller with his name attached would have seemed like a clear win. But the strange thing about Psycho Killer is that even when the script first appeared online, in 2007, it felt like a completely unnecessary B-movie, the kind of movie that might have been made cheaply and released straight to DVD unrated.

It’s hard then to understand why a film like Psycho Killer would get any form of theatrical release at this particularly difficult moment, when studios continue to lose millions trying, and often failing, to lure audiences away from their many screens. I kept waiting to get it, to find something special that might explain why it would give him the kind of studio that most filmmakers dream of, but I left confused. There may be enough competence in Poloni’s filmmaking to ensure that this won’t be the worst horror film of the year, but it’s probably the least necessary.

It’s a strange beast in that it’s too obvious and stupid to work as a crime thriller but too dull and fearless to work as horror, falling strangely somewhere in between. The film begins as the United States finds itself in the grip of a mask-wearing serial killer (wrestler turned actor James Preston Rogers), a shadowy figure making his way across the country leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. Its victims are found surrounded by satanic symbols and messages, and yet the FBI remains laughably ignorant and incompetent in a way that briefly makes it seem like a movie from 2026 after all. After her husband is murdered, police officer Jane (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) becomes obsessed with tracking him down.

We follow the protagonist and our antagonist almost as closely, like switching between video game characters, and both are written in roughly the same depth. We’re led toward something, a revelation that will explain this spree, which is bothered by the killer’s obsession with past crimes, but when the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it happens with a bang. There’s not enough revelation to justify the effort it takes to get there, despite some strong moments (there’s an action fight in a hotel room and Malcolm McDowell’s malicious hammer to wake us up briefly). I suppose it was the killer’s ambitious final act plan that kept people coming back to the screenplay, but the rushed ending ends up shaking people with indifference, and with a predictable ending to scare, even those who once aspired to this story will surely see this as a failure, completely disconnected from their vision of what this could be.

It’s just a third-rate episode of The X-Files but without the heavy influence of Mulder and Scully, the general grief-obsessed Campbell is unable to truly control. Its quest may be fruitful, but the film’s arduous journey out of development hell and into theaters does not reward those who participate and those of us who quit watching. Psycho Killer is as cute as its title.