Director: Gavin Polone
Writer: Andrew Kevin Walker
Stars: Georgina Campbell, James Preston Rogers, Malcolm McDowell
Synopsis: A police officer tracks a killer after her husband, a highway patrolman, becomes one of his victims.
Andrew Kevin Walker is a screenwriter well known among cinephiles. His writing perfectly complemented David Fincher’s ambition for Se7en. His new screenplay, Psycho Killer, attempts to recapture the eerie serial killer magic of Walker’s golden years. The ingredients are certainly present. The film has a killer who keeps his face in the shadows. Visually, everything feels BDSM-inspired because Satanists are required to love leather for some reason. And of course, the soundtrack has an industrial kick, with opening credits featuring scribble fonts and grainy textures. The nostalgia should work, but it instead feels like an unintentional parody of a mid-’90s horror/thriller.
Directed by Gavin Polone from a screenplay by Walker, the film centers on a highway patrol officer named Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell). In our first introduction to Jane, we see her husband murdered by a mysterious, long-haired gentleman in a black car. The setup is shot beautifully, with the camera remaining fixed on the reflection of the psycho’s sunglasses. Then the first red flag reveals itself. The mysterious gentleman speaks, and the voice has been ADR-ed to make the character sound cartoonishly menacing. It’s like someone in the production watched Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse and thought, “This is the way.”
Following her husband’s death, Jane learns that the man responsible is a serial killer called the Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers)—a vicious serial killer who has been leaving a trail of carved-up corpses across multiple states. Unlike Se7en, the latest film from Walker does not shy away from having extensive sequences with the Psycho Killer himself. We spend long moments with the long-haired maniac as he brutalizes victims, scopes the classifieds for other satanists, and sleeps in hotel closets. His ability to hibernate in hotel closets is another head-scratcher, given Rogers’s towering stature at six feet five inches. It shows him curling up in a closet with a gun, which seems impossible since most motel/hotel closets are limited in space.
The design of the Satan Slasher is incredibly on the nose and lacks nuance. He embodies Maynard James Keenan of Tool, but lacks the rockstar charisma. The overall execution reads like a collection of checkboxes for a mass murderer, such as they must wear black, have hair like Rob Zombie or Alice Cooper, and everything must feel “Metal.” For instance, one sequence sees the Satanic Slasher enter a Catholic Church to give confession, only for the conversation to end with him stabbing the priest in the neck with a giant metal straw and drinking the blood of the priest. The execution should be tense in moments like this, but instead, it accidentally feels like a movie making fun of the genre.
Se7en worked because the screenplay understood the simplicity of John Doe. He was a psychopath who could easily blend into the background because nothing about his presence screams dangerous. The 1995 film brilliantly commented on the expectations of evil as Morgan Freeman’s character, Detective Somerset, explains, regardless of the extremity of his crimes, “He is still just a man.” With Psycho Killer, the movie feels like Walker never escaped the 1994 timeline. One can almost picture Psycho Killer as the screenplay he wrote before Se7en, while sitting in his office listening to “The Downward Spiral” by Nine Inch Nails on repeat. The film desperately wants to relive the industrial rock era of cinema, when bad guys wore leather and rocked out to Stabbing Westward. Movies like Spawn, for example, borrowed heavily from this example. Admittedly, there is something terrifyingly pleasurable about the industrial rock aesthetic of ’90s thrillers. But the visual nature of movies like Se7en was never the draw; it was the exceptional character work and story. And for the most part, the film is completely absent from character development.
Psycho Killer is not a complete disaster. For about ten minutes, the film loosens up and embraces its own absurdity. The Satanic Slasher tracks down a wealthy Satanist through the classifieds. It’s here that we meet Mr. Pendleton, played by the incredible presence of Malcolm McDowell. The sequence has elements of world-building akin to John Wick, hinting at an underworld of ritualistic devil worshippers. The humor is played up because the Satanic Slasher is too weird for even them. However, the sequence is short-lived and follows a massacre, bathed in a distracting amount of CGI blood.
By the time the film concludes, it reveals a major plot twist that raises more questions than it answers. We are given the reasons the Satan Slasher has been on a bloodbath, and the reveal is devoid of emotion. We should feel a sense of emotional dread for Jane and those who may be affected by his master plan, yet we do not. And once the whole climax unfolds, we are offered a tease for a sequel that no one will rightfully beg for. At the end of the day, the film’s quality shouldn’t be surprising. Psycho Killer has been in development hell for years, and at one point, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit was attached to direct. Even so, the idea that Andrew Kevin Walker wrote this screenplay is baffling.
