Psycho Killer: an old-born horror, between satanic cults and revenges to be carried out

Jane and Mike Archer are a happily married couple of police officers who one day find themselves stopping a suspicious car. The driver cold-bloodedly kills the man and Jane fails to stop him: it will soon be discovered that the killer was none other than the infamous Satanic Ripper, a serial killer who has been terrorizing the United States for weeks.

Determined to avenge her deceased husband, the protagonist of Psycho Killer decides to go it alone on the psychopath's trail, whose trail of blood continues relentlessly. The man leaves behind satanic symbols, musical references, and clues that Jane believes she can decipher, allowing her to be ahead of official investigations, to the point that the villain himself ends up engaging her in a kind of macabre challenge.

Psycho Killer's story is a familiar one

Such an archetypal nemesis hasn't been seen in genre cinema for a long time, with extreme music, a gas mask, and a black coat making the boogeyman an unintentional caricature, moving throughout the ninety minutes of viewing like a killing machine without particular insights or underlying motivations. Psycho Killer is a heavily derivative horror that fails to find original solutions, repeatedly falling into the improbable and culminating in a final showdown far beyond the absurd, yet another flawed element of a screenplay that seems written with artificial intelligence.

The premise was certainly full of potential, the ideal basis for a dirty and nasty slasher, even more so considering that the script is by Andrew Kevin Walker, who in the mid-nineties gave birth to a great cult on the subject like Seven (1995). The problem is that, after the admittedly captivating opening, director Gavin Polone seems to get lost along the way, not knowing where to direct the atmosphere of a story that progressively unravels, even bringing in nuclear incidents and esoteric references at random.

Wish I could, but I can't

It must be said that the project had been in the works for about twenty years, with Walker having completed the draft in the mid-2000s, and it passed through several hands before finding an actual screen adaptation. Thus, the narrative dynamics appear already seen, now old and worn out for contemporary genre cinema, moreover without the necessary personality from those who brought them to the screen. Psycho Killer is a full-fledged b-movie, devoid of irony or awareness of its own limitations, which dares but miserably fails in its ambitions.

The character of Jane, who should be the emotional heart of the story, never appears convincing or worthy of empathy, despite the evident commitment of Georgina Campbell, who however clashes with the limitations of a one-dimensional character, a direct counterpart to the cartoonish antagonist. The investigative journey proceeds mechanically from one murder to the next and the clues themselves don't add much to the dichotomously antithetical relationship between the two. There's even room for a purely cult passage, with the guru leading the demon's followers played by Malcolm McDowell who at least has the flair to excessively overact his performance, probably aware of the mess he had already signed up for.