Psycho Killer Movie opens to harsh reviews for Gavin Polone’s directorial debut
The new psycho killer movie from producer-turned-director Gavin Polone has reached theaters and is being criticized for its story, scares and long, troubled development. Reviewers single out Georgina Campbell’s turn as a Kansas highway patrol officer and James Preston Rogers’s hulking, mask-wearing killer, but call the film overall dull and inessential.
Psycho Killer Movie draws blame for weak thrills and muddled tone
Critics describe the film as an unsuccessful slasher that struggles to land scares or sustain tension, despite an effective opening traffic-stop scene set on a Kansas highway. Georgina Campbell plays Jane, a highway patrol officer who witnesses her husband — a fellow patrolman — shot during a routine stop, and then sets out to track the hulking assailant played by James Preston Rogers.
Reviewers note the killer’s grotesque presentation — enormous stature, a deep, altered-sounding voice and a radiation mask — and say the character’s menace is undermined by the film’s lack of coherent fright. The antagonist is dubbed the Satanic Slasher in the story for the satanic symbols and blood-painted messages left at crime scenes, a detail reviewers cite when criticizing the movie’s tone and plot choices.
Cast, crew and the long road to release
Gavin Polone makes his feature directorial debut from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of Seven, and the film runs 1 hour 32 minutes with an R rating for cutting violence and crushing stupidity. Malcolm McDowell appears as a coke-fueled leader of a gang of poser Satanists who inhabit a mansion briefly described in reviews as a Scooby-Doo–ready estate.
Review coverage highlights the script’s own history: it circulated for nearly two decades with several stalled attempts at production before finally being made. One reviewer points out a string of near-directing attachments and funding attempts over the years, and notes the film’s eventual studio rollout into more than 1, 000 cinemas by 20th Century distribution.
Opening scene and several confrontations fail to redeem the picture
Many critics praise the opening scene — a roadside traffic stop in flat Kansas terrain that ends with the patrolman’s murder — as a moment of effective horror, and they single out a motel-room confrontation in which Jane barely escapes as a standout sequence. Yet reviews say those set pieces are not enough: the film is called too straightforward to succeed as a crime thriller and too dull to succeed as horror, leaving audiences with a muddled final act rather than a revelatory payoff.
Georgina Campbell’s performance is repeatedly identified as a strong element, with reviewers noting her ability to carry the hunt for the Satanic Slasher even while the FBI in the story is portrayed as ineffectual. James Preston Rogers’s physical presence as the killer draws comment for being oddly conspicuous for a serial murderer, and Malcolm McDowell’s turn as Mr. Pendleton is described as energetic but not enough to lift the film.
The screenplay’s pedigree is also a frequent talking point: Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, penned this script in the mid-2000s and the project cycled through potential directors and producers over many years before finally getting made under Polone’s helm. That backstory factors into critics’ bafflement over why the film received a broad theatrical release rather than a smaller, cult-focused rollout.
The film is listed with a release date of Friday, February 20, and its 1 hour 32 minute runtime and R rating are noted in review coverage. Audiences can see the film in theaters beginning on that Friday, and the next confirmed event for the picture is that theatrical opening.
