Every now and again, a movie comes along that has legendarily bad buzz, and I can’t stay away. I love a good spectacle, and when a movie is of the ‘slow down and gawk at the car crash’ variety, it could pull me in even more than a good movie can. Gavin Polone’s directorial debut Psycho Killer hadn’t really been on my radar. I go to the movies all the time and never saw a trailer for it appear before anything. It was kind of unceremoniously dumped in theaters without any fanfare whatsoever, and it’s easy to see why. Today I learned the unfortunate lesson that maybe I shouldn’t take the trainwreck-movie bait. Sometimes, legendarily bad movies are just boring as hell. 

Jane (Georgina Campbell) is a sheriff, also married to a police officer who is shot dead in front of her by a man he’s pulled over at a traffic stop. She soon discovers this man is a serial killer known as the Satanic Slasher (how original) and he of course plans to kill again. Jane is determined to get to the bottom of this case and achieve vengeance for her husband’s murder.

So, our first-week-of-January horror movie arrived a little late this year. From the opening moments of Psycho Killer, it’s clear what they’re going for. After most horror movies that make a splash, a parade of imitators follows them. And it’s clear in the opening credits that Psycho Killer is kind of like a Temu version of Osgood Perkins’ hit 2024 film Longlegs. The way these opening titles are designed, as well as so much of what comes after them, feels so hacky and so generic. It never helps that the film is hideously crafted – there’s plenty of bad acting, bad CGI, laughable dialogue and the film never once gives you anything viscerally scary. It never gets under your skin, it kind of just exists in this weird middle ground of not quite so-bad-it’s-good and yet, something it’s kind of baffling they released into movie theaters rather than dumping on a streaming service. 

Georgina Campbell, honestly, is the primary reason I was interested in this film at all. The star of Zach Cregger’s 2022 breakout feature debut Barbarian, it seemed possible another Georgina Campbell horror vehicle might repeat the magic of Barbarian. Well, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. This script has almost nothing for her to do. She’s mainly just reacting to things, her expression a constant doe-eyed look of shock. And one single character trait is not enough to make a character interesting for 90 minutes. The film never bothers to tell you anything about this character’s past or her internal life. Campbell is given one note to play here, and that’s it. The film is doing her so dirty, I found it actively frustrating.

James Preston Rogers plays the masked ‘Satanic Slasher’ and it sounds like everything he says is going through some kind of voice changing device. This is the kind of thing you see a lot in masked killer horror movies, but usually someone is having more fun with it than Rogers. Grace Dove plays a detective who points Jane in the direction of the masked killer, and I’m not familiar with this actress, I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but her line readings are laughably awful, and she seems like she’s in a completely different movie than everyone else. 

Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker has an impressive list of credits to his name, starting with David Fincher’s Se7en. Unfortunately he never quite made anything on the same level since then, and this is no exception. Some of the dialogue here is so unintentionally funny, I could pinpoint the precise moment where the audience I was with stopped taking this film seriously and started laughing at it. There’s also not much to report on regarding the craft, or lack thereof, in the film. I didn’t notice a single shot that was memorably staged. Nothing to report on the score, costume or production design either. 

I need to take a second here to list some of the 20th Century Studios/Fox films Disney chose to release only on streaming, on Hulu. In the past few years, films like Prey, Fire Island, Fresh, Rosaline, Boston Strangler, No One Will Save You, Quiz Lady, and The Princess were denied theatrical releases and were just released on Hulu instead. Not all of these films are great, but all of them deserved a theatrical release more than Psycho Killer. I realize that the men in suits who make the decisions in Hollywood are still navigating the tricky landscape of post pandemic media. It seems like no company really knows how to run its business anymore. But I’m curious what the thought process were. Because no movie I have recently seen reeks more of the ‘second screen viewing’ experience than Psycho Killer. 

Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single reason to recommend Psycho Killer. Georgina Campbell remains a watchable, promising talent, but she can’t save the film from its many problems. The mystery is flat and unengaging, the scares are pretty much nonexistent, it’s shamelessly derivative, ripping off a hundred better movies that you’ll wish you were watching instead of this. The film’s biggest problem, however, is that it’s just plain boring. There’s no urgency in the storytelling, no effective tension, no creativity in the kills, not even any effective jump scares. It’s never a good sign when the purpose of the jump scare in a horror movie is to wake the viewer up.