Psycho Killer

2026

Crime / Horror / Thriller

Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 37% · 42 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 37% · 250 ratings
IMDb Rating 4.7/10 10 1367 1.4K

police cult cop murder priest serial killer

Plot summary

Following the brutal murder of her husband, a Kansas highway patrol officer sets out on a journey to track down the perpetrator. As the hunt progresses, she comes to realize the man responsible is a sadistic serial killer, and the depth of his mental depravity and his sinister agenda is more twisted than anyone could have imagined.

Director

Gavin Polone Photo
Gavin Polone

Top cast

Bradley Sawatzky Photo
Bradley Sawatzky as Man's Voice
Curtis Moore Photo
Curtis Moore as News Radio Anchor
Malcolm McDowell Photo
Malcolm McDowell as Mr. Pendleton
James Preston Rogers Photo
James Preston Rogers as Psycho Killer
720p.WEB
838.15 MB
1280*534
English 2.0
R
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 31 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by 3 / 10

An utter mess.

I'll be honest, I opted for this after bottling Wuthering Heights. A serial killer slasher is normally right up my alley, so this felt like a safe bet. I hadn't even realised it existed until I saw it listed, but the premise suggested something tense, nasty and entertaining.Instead, it's a slog.The film is incoherent, drab and painfully lacking in any genuine sense of horror. There are no real scares, no mounting dread, just a sequence of scenes that feel loosely assembled and oddly lifeless. Even stranger, it somehow feels dated, as though it had been shelved for 25 years before quietly being released.The ending is utterly absurd. You have to wonder if it was a rushed job, it made zero sense. That's never a good sign for what's meant to be a climactic payoff.What makes it worse is that the premise itself is actually pretty good. There's a solid idea buried in here somewhere. I'm genuinely perplexed at how they managed to take something with potential and drain it of all tension and atmosphere.I like Georgina Campbell, but she's surprisingly poor here. Whether that's the writing, direction, or simply a lack of conviction, it doesn't land.Another polished product from Disney.3/10.
Reviewed by 5 / 10

Just okay

I went into "Psycho Killer" blind, knowing nothing about it except its title, being only under the assumption that the film was about, well, a psycho killer. However, from seeing the poster with its marketing copy of "Meet your new nightmare, from the twisted writer of Seven and 8MM," I found myself getting excited - I found myself harboring expectations. I began to expect a visually striking, savagely violent cat-and-mouse thriller, a brutal, unapologetic horror movie. Did I get that? Yes and no.Typically I'm sick of satanic horror films but in "Psycho Killer," I quite enjoyed the unabashed enthusiasm of the classic satanic panic cliches. The killer has an obscene amount of demonic imagery tattooed on his body, and he uses either his own blood or the blood of his victims to draw occult symbols in his crime scenes; even the mask he wears has a red goat drawn on it to emphasize how much this man loves Satan. "I live to serve him," he even says at one point, as if that wasn't immediately obvious based on his appearance and actions. What actions, you ask? Namely, random and indiscriminate murder.Surprisingly enough, "Psycho Killer" isn't an overly violent film, but it has enough brutality to satisfy your typical horror fan. There's a particularly memorable kill that takes place in a church that's going to haunt my dreams tonight, and there's a scene where our titular psycho killer slashes a few people to death with an axe that I found very satisfying to watch, namely due to it's Zack Snyder-esque slow motion and stylized CGI blood. There are a few other kills here, but most of them are honestly somewhat restrained, which did disappoint me, namely due to the fact that a movie titled "Psycho Killer" was barely letting its psycho killer act like a psycho killer. I would've enjoyed and appreciated a few more scenes of abject depravity and violence, but for what's here, I was entertained enough.I recently watched "Escape Plan: The Extractions," a direct-to-DVD geezer teaser, and that movie's lighting was so poor that it reminded me how difficult it is to shoot a movie that looks good. "Psycho Killer" looks good, and I don't take that for granted. There is competency and care behind the camera here, and you can tell that, at least, people wanted this thing to be good looking.Where does "Psycho Killer" go wrong? The biggest pothole this hits is in its storytelling. On paper this is a tight, taut cat-and-mouse serial killer chase film, but in execution it feels a lot more random and dull. While the hook of our heroine hunting down this maniac is intriguing enough, there isn't that classic investigatory exploration that you get from other movies of this same genre (like Seven and 8MM). A large portion of this movie is people driving from one location to another, and a lot of this footage feels like b-roll that they slapped some narration or something over to get us from one scene to the next. There isn't really a sense of forward momentum or purpose - it feels more like a scattered, random selection of scenes that sometimes turn into short story beats until they finally lead to a slaphazard ending that doesn't really pay off. And don't even get me started about the very ending - what was that?Ultimately, "Psycho Killer" is just okay. I didn't hate this movie, but I didn't love it. I'm not sure I even really liked it. But I enjoyed parts of it, and I can see myself rewatching it one day when I'm bored and have nothing else to do.
Reviewed by 4 / 10

Psycho Killer certainly swings for the fences with its violent imagery but lacks any kind of point and feels about 20 years out of date with its tropes

A serial killer known as the Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers) has been on a violent rampage across the United States leaving behind Satanic and occult imagery and messages written in the blood of his victims at the scenes. When Kansas State Trooper Mike Archer (Stephen Adekolu) has the misfortune of pulling over the slasher's vehicle, he is killed as his Trooper wife Jane (Georgina Campbell) witnesses the murder and his death. Driven by a desire for revenge, Jane takes leave from her job set on ending the slasher's rampage unaware he has much larger ambitions than the brutal murders he's enacted.Psycho Killer has had a long road to development with Seven and 8MM screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker having written a draft of this script as far as 2007 when none other than Fred Durst of all people was set to direct. The script found its way to producer Gavin Polone, who has history working with Walker having produced 8MM as well as having had Walker work as a script doctor on Stir of Echos. Polone had set his sights on making his directorial debut with Psycho Killer. What followed was a parade of producers and companies who were attached at various points but never actually followed through for reasons that haven't been disclosed. Eli Roth was at one point attached as a producer, and given the level of intensity of cruelty his films are known for it's a little surprising that even he couldn't get a project like this off the ground (though Walker's scripts are often known for being so dark and twisted some such as Ned Beatty who passed on playing John Doe in Seven used words like "evil" to describe the scripts). Eventually, the film was formally greenlit in 2023 and even completed shooting during that year. With the film having been shot three years ago and now coming out at just over 1,000 theaters, one gets the impression that 20th Century Studios didn't have too much faith in this film. Having seen the film, their lack of faith was certainly warranted because this is an absolutely laughable disaster.With the film being another retread of the "cops versus serial killers" genre that was pioneered by Silence of the Lambs and especially Seven in terms of themes, style, and tone the movie even tries to ape Seven's iconic opening sequence in a way that seems blissfully unaware of the past 30 years worth of development that has seen that genre move into broadcast and streaming even now with stuff like The Hunting Party and Cross very much keeping that alive for their target audience. While on occasion stuff like this can break out to the mainstream such as 2024's Longlegs that managed to impress critics and audiences with its style and tone, more often than not you're gonna get something like The Postcard Killings which is destined to take up viewing in between episodes of Criminal Minds. With Psycho Killer it starts from a place of relatively bland normalcy (at least as far as this genre is concerned) but with each step goes further and further off the rails to the point my mouth was agape at the literally explosive stupidity that happens in the third act. Wrestler turned actor James Preston Rogers is certainly physically imposing as the Satanic Slasher (who's largely nameless until a nonsensical epilogue) but is basically a two dimensional carnage machine who speaks in a spooky imposing voice that from the first frame carries the weight of someone trying to be scary that feels less like a legitimate threat and more like a funhouse mirror image of what someone thinks a threat is supposed to be. Georgina Campbell is also hopelessly lost as Jane Archer who's supposed to be this vengeance driven and obsessed character, but despite being a proven actor in things like Broadchurch and Barbarian she feels overly detached in a role that should call for her to be more driven, more of a live-wire, but she has the air of someone doing a coffee run and being mildly annoyed at the traffic.It's really not Campbell's fault she can't bring this character to life, because the story is held together with duct tape and hope where actions only have consequences when they need to and even physical damage is more of a suggestion than a necessity. This comes from the first encounter between Jane and the slasher where she shoots out his rear windshield and next we see him his rear windshield is perfectly fine to the point I thought this was a flashback (it wasn't). Another instance happens when the slasher rams Jane's truck and uses her misaligned axle to aid in his escape, but much like the slasher's rear windshield that dented fender and twisted axle is fixed once again by the magic of the jump cut. Then of course there's the whole aspect of how Jane is engaging in vigilante justice which even the movie acknowledges in a news report, but despite twice engaging in firefights and skirmishes with the slasher there's never any threat from the authorities in trying to stop her nor do the FBI seem to care she's interfering with a federal case. This movie seems to exist in some kind of bizarro universe where proper procedure doesn't exist which probably explains how we get to the climax we do. Like most Andrew Kevin Walker works there's certainly a plethora of violence and sexuality (such as a "Satanic" orgy slash massacre sequence that is definitely testing the limits of the R-rating) but there's very much a feeling of "been there done that" and aside from some very mild commentary on media obsession with serial killers (showing telltale signs of the fact the screenplay is 20 years old as newspapers, TV, and radio are the primary outlets with only a passing reference to 8chan of all things in a throwaway exchange) the movie doesn't have much going for it other than going for such a massively stupid climax and a massively stupid ending stinger that you kind of have to admire how far it went even if it's borderline laughable.Psycho Killer is a terrible movie, but it's such a good time that I just can't help but smile thinking it over. Oh sure, it's grimy imagery and violent sadism was old hat 20 years ago when the Saw series was delivering annual entries, but no Saw film EVER had a plan this silly and ridiculous and this includes the infamous Saw 3D. From its dated "Satanic" imagery that's been demystified not only by the FBI (during their competent years) but also by shows such as Stranger Things and Hysteria, Psycho Killer feels like a man out of time in the best possible way. Like watching that edgelord friend from high school thinking he's being "soooooo provactive" when really everyone is just bored with his antics and making the occasional smirk.
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