A Satanic Slasher on a Road Trip

Any slasher movie with a half-assed gimme title like Psycho Killer won’t impress even the most generous Talking Heads fan. Buyer beware for any who get tickets for this stylish but simplistic thriller, a first-draft-at-best tale about a Satanic Panic murderer and the widowed policewoman who wants vengeance for her collateral-damage dead cop husband. It’s a paint-by-numbers exercise in connect-the-dots sleuthing, doused in monochromatic beige-to-brown cinematography and an aural atmosphere of thumping slow-pulse drones.

Psycho Killer ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Gavin Polone
Written by: Andrew Kevin Walker
Starring: Georgina Campbell, James Preston Rogers, Malcolm McDowell, Logan Miller, Grace Dove
Running time: 91 mins

This narrative corpse does have some good bones, though, with a haunting premise of seemingly ritualistic murders and a mysterious set of clues all pointing towards a seismic conflagration that aims to unleash Hell on earth with mass death and destruction. If only the filmmakers had more committed minds and more capable hands focused on sharpening its plot points. Instead, we’re just lazily given a pumped-up madman with a dark voice, a penchant for goggled gimp masks, and a chestful of pentagram tattoos, barreling down the highway on a bloody road-trip bender through the continental U.S.

And what a gory voyage! When the movie starts, the body count already hovers around 32 after a 16-day span and ends up closer to 50. What kind of broke-ass law enforcement system lets an interstate killing spree across multiple small towns and cities rack up staggering numbers like that? How is there not a manhunt dragnet operation in every single stop from Nevada to Pennsylvania? Is no one writing down license plate numbers? This chasm of a discrepancy goes unexplained, even after the titular villain — nicknamed the Satanic Slasher — leaves one motel room festooned with messages drawn in blood from the mutilated body of a cleaning lady. Another unsatisfied customer at La Quinta, I guess. Nothing suspicious there.

The sole scene with the Illinois branch of the FBI shows a cocky but feckless bureau head bark at a bunch of befuddled T-men. I’m all for portraits of bureaucratic dysfunction, but at least put a little effort into making it believable. When Buffalo Bill was kidnapping and skinning his comparatively small handful of victims in The Silence of the Lambs, federal, state and local cops swarmed every scene. Here, not so much.

What we get instead is mournful Kansas trooper Jane Archer (Georgina Campbell), who, due to a breathtaking lack of interstate police coordination, apparently has to go rogue in her quest to track down her spouse’s executioner. Campbell conveys an admirable sense of steely purpose with abashed horror as she methodically hunts down her man, doing her best with what little she’s been given. Among the flashing-red bread crumbs Archer collects: the Satanic Slasher’s habit of obsessively writing 3/28 everywhere. The fact that he’s stolen 20 pounds of TNT (yikes). The fact that he’s also stolen someone’s “secret stash of hand grenades” (wait, what?). The fact that he constantly writes OPEN THE GATES. Does the FBI ever speculate on a possible domestic terrorist attack on 3/28? Not at all.

Psycho Killer does have a creepy sense of chaos which interrupts all the head-slapping idiocy and makes for genuinely bizarre moments of gore. Like the hysterical woman the Satanic Slasher stalks down a night road who gets conveniently run over by an out-of-control tanker truck that then explodes instantly. Or the bashed-in head he dips his hand into for some finger painting. Or the priest he impales in a confessional booth with a hollow spear — which he then uses like a straw to suck the gushing blood from his praying prey’s jugular vein.

The filmmakers are also self-aware enough to add unexpected levity, like the Baltimore-based coven of Lucifer’s followers led by a blowhard magus (Malcolm McDowell, relishing the inanity) who seem to be more interested in take-out Chinese food and LSD-fueled orgies (set to Richard Wagner’s operas) than in planning for the imminent arrival of their Dark Lord. The Satanic Slasher seems disgusted by their amateur-hour theatrics, although he does weirdly give a pass to a guileless eager-beaver member named Marvin (Logan Miller).

Once-hot ’90s screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en) penned this thin gruel of a script, which reportedly had been floating around Hollywood for more than twenty years. That might account for laughably outdated contrivances like the killer’s habit of using public pay phones and communicating with people though classified ads in local newspapers. How cute that this movie aches to give Zodiac vibes in a story that, with its cell phones and internet searches, takes place solidly in the 21^st century.

A punch-up polish might have smoothed out these anomalies and possibly sparked more clever designs for this dud of a demonic thriller. Still, there’s an undeniable texture to the proceedings — the desolate highways, the chill-wrapped winter landscapes, the unnerving visceral visuals, the sorrel-colored surroundings — that make Psycho Killer difficult to completely dispel.