'Psycho Killer' Debuted with a Rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Its Troubled History Shows Why
From the writer of Se7en and a producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm comes Psycho Killer, a long-delayed knife thriller which debuted last weekend to a rare zero percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. (It’s since risen to a meager 10 percent, and has a slightly more appreciative audience score of 36 percent.) Is the movie really as bad as the reviews suggest?
Psycho Killer Is a Mess, But Never Boring
Georgina Campbell, of Barbarian and Influencers and Cold Storage, stars as a highway patrol officer whose husband is murdered in front of her during a traffic stop by the cleverly named Satanic Slasher (former wrestler James Preston Rogers). So begins the grieving woman’s cross-country quest to stop the slasher, whose driving state-to-state bashing brains with sledgehammers in the name of…something. He keeps writing “open the gates” at crime scenes using the blood of his victims, which also means…something. And then there’s the ending, which seems to be saying something about America’s involvement in violence and war and finger-pointing…or something.
The consistent positive on Psycho Killer’s side is that it’s never boring. The movie makes no sense and is clearly cobbled together from loose ends, but it’s handsomely shot and fairly light on its feet. It makes a genuine bid at being so bad it’s good, and as such is a fine 90-minute distraction that will play better on streaming than in the cinema. Though it bungles the landing, its climax is so preposterous and unexpected that the film itself seems destined to occupy a very specific corner of cult cinema.
20th Century Studios
The Movie's Creation Is the Biggest Mystery of All
Psycho Killer has been marketed as coming from “a producer of Barbarian and a producer of Weapons,” a bon mot which does no favors to any of the named pictures. This is nowhere near on the level of either Barbarian (in which Campbell also starred) or Weapons, both of which were directed with panache by Zach Cregger. Psycho Killer is the first directorial feature from longtime producer Gavin Polone, best known for his work on the Zombieland movies and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Why he chose this for his debut feature as director is anyone’s guess.
At first, you might assume Polone got the job because the studio just needed a sure hand to guide this towards some sort of completion; but he’s actually been attached as director since 2010, three years after Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker penned the screenplay. After 16 years in development, the movie was shot in 2023 and certified with an R rating by the MPA in 2024. It’s since sat, finished, awaiting release. Last weekend, Disney’s 20th Century Studios released it to about 1,000 theaters, where it grossed under $2M. The theatrical release was so perfunctory and under-advertised that it could only have been a contractual obligation owed to Polone or Walker by the studio.
There must have been something to the screenplay that really popped, at least enough to keep people circling back to it for nearly two decades. But there’s no sign of originality in the finished product, nor anything to distinguish this from a slightly glossier-than-average streaming release. There are baroque flourishes that entertain in an eyebrow-raising manner, such as an extended sequence in which Malcolm McDowell presides over a fully-nude Satanic orgy-turned-massacre; but overall, each and every scene lacks context and seems removed from what comes before and after.
Evident Reshoots Render the Material Incomprehensible
The movie has obviously been extensively retooled (Saw sequel director Kevin Gruetert is credited as "additional editor,” indicating a certain level of post-production tinkering), with ADR doing a lot of the hard work and plot strands introduced and abandoned within seconds. A pivotal turn regarding Campbell’s character feels like it was left in the film accidentally; and the final scene, played as a sequel-baiting twist, hints at a storyline which was likely much more prominent in previous iterations. Psycho Killer is a head-scratcher, but it joins a pantheon of movies that have been so obviously retooled and pulled apart from what they once were that their very existence is an enduring curiosity.