I love horror movies, I enjoy slashers, and revenge stories. Give me masked maniacs, creative kills, and a tight script and I’m a happy guy. But this movie, Psycho Killer? This was painful to watch.
This is the kind of film where you start checking your watch, then start laughing at things that definitely were not meant to be funny. I went in ready for something dark, intense, and scary. What I got instead was a baffling mess that feels unfinished and completely lifeless.
The concept actually sounded promising! Georgina Campbell plays a Kansas highway patrol officer whose husband is brutally murdered. Instead of grieving quietly, she goes on the hunt, chasing the killer across the country.
The movie was marketed as a gritty revenge thriller with emotional weight and escalating dread. As the story unfolds, her target turns out to be a sadistic satanic serial killer played by James Preston Rogers, and the film tries to suggest that his motives are more twisted than anyone could have imagined. That was the idea, at least. The execution is another story entirely.
The biggest problem is the script. The dialogue is flat. The story jumps around. Scenes feel like they’re missing connective tissue. Scenes come and go with no resolution, like entire chunks of the film were lost in the edit.
The pacing is all over the place. I kept hoping for the movie to find its rhythm, but it never does. It just stumbles forward from one hollow and empty moment to the next.
And here’s the wild part. The screenplay comes from Andrew Kevin Walker, the same writer behind Se7en. I kept thinking about that the whole time I was watching this. How is it possible that the mind behind one of the most disturbing and tightly constructed thrillers ever made also wrote this?!
It doesn’t even come close to operating on the same level. There’s no layered mystery, no mounting dread, no psychological edge. It’s shockingly devoid of tension, which is almost unforgivable for a serial killer horror film.
Then there’s the killer himself. Rogers tries to bring menace to the role, but the character just doesn’t work. He’s big and brutal, sure. People get killed in savage ways. But there’s nothing interesting underneath it. No presence. No personality beyond generic evil. Then there’s his voice.
They gave him this overly exaggerated, cartoonishly deep voice that completely undercuts any attempt at intimidation. I’m not exaggerating when I say he sounds like a parody villain from an Adult Swim cartoon airing in the middle of the night. Every time he spoke, I found myself laughing. That is not the reaction you want from your horror audience.
The film also marks the feature directorial debut of Gavin Polone, who previously produced films like Zombieland and Panic Room. Producing and directing are clearly very different skill sets.
The movie feels very amateurish, with awkward performances, bad dialogue, and some painfully obvious CGI blood splatter that looks like it was added during a late night editing session with a student version of visual effects software. It’s honestly surprising this got a major theatrical release.
By the time the movie ended, I was just confused. Confused about how this got funded. Confused about how no one stepped in and tightened the script. Confused about how a movie from the guy who wrote Se7en ended up feeling so bland and forgettable.
I respect how hard it is to make a movie. I really do. But if you’re going to make a slasher horror film and have a decent budget to work with, at least make a good movie. Psycho Killer is a poorly made film, and you should save your money.
