Released: 20th February
Seen: 6th August
In 1995, the movie Se7en came out to good reviews and a great box office. It’s the film that made people start noticing David Fincher as a director, gave several people involved some much-needed career boosts and is nowadays considered an absolute classic of the genre, showing how genuinely intelligent and dark a crime thriller could actually be. The man who wrote it was Andrew Kevin Walker, who has written several other films, done script doctoring on some major works like Fight Club and even wrote an episode of Tales From The Crypt, so he should be considered a genuinely great writer… and he wrote the script for the movie Psycho Killer, so even the greats can write absolute trash.
Psycho Killer revolves around Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell), a traffic cop who is just doing her job when she witnesses her husband being murdered by a serial killer known as the Satanic Slasher AKA Richard Reeves (James Preston Rogers). Naturally, that means she’d like to find him and kill him and so she spends the entire film tracking him down to try and kill him, learning more about him in the process which reveals he wants to open the gates of hell using the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. That is where this film will climax… or do whatever the hell we call the ending for this film, I think in order to have a climax you technically have to reach some kind of emotional high and that’s just too much effort for this film but for the purposes of this review, we’re calling it a climax.
It’s really hard to talk about Psycho Killer because the fact of the matter is that there isn’t much to talk about because it’s trash and not even interesting trash. It’s not remarkably offensive or so stupid that it warrants mockery or even a film with such obvious flaws that detailing what needs to be fixed feels cathartic… no, no Psycho Killer is just bad in an unremarkable way and the only thing kind of interesting about its failure is that the talent of the cast and crew should’ve made failure a statistical impossibility. It’s a film where you can sit and stare, waiting for something to happen and even though there is technically movement on the screen and people are making sounds that could count as dialogue, nothing really interesting actually happens so you can just tune it all out.
What’s stunning is that there are moments here that should count as interesting; indeed, the descriptions of some of these moments might make you go “Hey, that sounds kind of cool”, but I assure you they’re not. It should be kind of fun seeing a serial killer in a gimp mask shove a giant metal straw through the wall of a church confessional and jam it into a priest’s neck like they were a juice box before drinking the priest’s blood like a hungry, hungry hippo… it should be, but it’s not, it’s just kind of stupid and means nothing in the long run.
It SHOULD be kind of fun for a satanic orgy to be rudely interrupted by a serial killer in a gimp mask running around and slamming an axe into people’s naked fleshy bodies but no, it’s somehow incredibly dull despite the inclusion of Malcolm McDowell (who should stop saying yes to absolutely everything he’s ever offered, he cannot need money this badly). I should be jumping with joy at the pure campiness of a gimp mask-wearing serial killer doing satanic rituals in the middle of a nuclear power plant but I almost fell asleep. So many potentially cool or interesting moments are presented with such bland sterility that you almost have to wonder if they were actively trying to make cool ideas as dull as possible.
It doesn’t help that Psycho Killer just looks bad, with shoddy editing and lighting so dark that there are times you just can’t see shit. Some stuff is so badly filmed that you have to rewind just to catch major moments (or what Psycho Killer thinks are major moments, we’re being kind and letting it claim it has any major moments). Nothing is interesting to really look at here, which isn’t a thing one should be able to say about a film where a serial killer in a gimp mask happens upon a satanic orgy. That should be one of the most interesting scenes just on content alone, but my god it feels so sterile, so bland and basic. It’s like there’s an active attempt to just avoid making the interesting choice, and if they somehow accidentally stumble into a choice that could be considered interesting then they have to do something to make it bland again.
Even the performances are pretty much universally bland, and in perhaps my hottest take I’ll go so far as to say the whole cast is just phoning it in. Some reviewers have said that the lead is particularly good; honestly, I just think that’s because she has the most screentime and after a while showing some form of actual emotion in this film makes you feel like the star. Nothing is interesting or realistic about any of the acting choices, everyone delivers performances that can best be described as “We didn’t bother with a second take” and no one really stands out as doing anything remarkable. It’s a cast of people trying to get by and make a dull script work, but I guess Satan himself wanted to make sure that nothing came out of this that was remotely worth a damn because no one really makes it out of this thing with anything to show for it.
Psycho Killer just can’t be bothered to actually do something worth a damn. It can’t be so dark and emotional that it’s captivating, it can’t be so campy and over the top that it’s amusing, it can’t even just be such a fascinating mystery that you want to solve it… it just doesn’t care, it’s a paint-by-numbers affair that knows the core structure of what a film like this should be and does nothing of value with it, which sucks because there are interesting ideas here that could have been turned into something fun to watch but that would mean that someone at some point would have to give a fuck and it’s pretty clear that no one involved in this had a single fuck to give.
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