Bringing together a collective that has had past credits including some outstanding movies such as Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman’s psychological thriller Seven, 2024 smash Late Night with the Devil, and two of the best movies of 2025 in Weapons and The Long Walk, seems almost certain to lead to a stunning new horror release. Instead, it has produced one of the worst-rated movies released so far in 2026 in Psycho Killer.
Starring Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell and Hollywood veteran Malcolm McDowell, Psycho Killer isn’t exactly hiding its subject matter with a bold and clear title. The story focuses on a Kansas highway patrol officer (Campbell), who becomes bent on tracking down the murderer responsible for the brutal killing of her husband. Her investigation leads her down a dark path when she discovers the person she is hunting is a sadistic serial killer with a sinister agenda and mental depravity that is beyond comprehension.
Under the direction of Zombieland and Cold Storage producer Gavin Polone on his debut behind the camera, written by Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, and with a producer team including Weapons and The Long Walk‘s Roy Lee, Psycho Killer has completely failed to live up to any kind of expectations this collection of talented creatives brings with it. The film currently has a 0% rating from critics and 31% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The question is, why?
‘Psycho Killer’ Promises Much but Delivers Very Little
The horror genre has been made up of several key tropes for decades, which is why generic sequels and remakes are constantly being churned out year after year. However, even movies that lean into the tried and tested can bring something surprising and new to the floor, but Psycho Killer isn’t one of them.
For a movie to have no redeeming features in the eyes of critics is an achievement in itself, just not one that anyone will probably want to shout about afterward. Psycho Killer is such a misfire that New York Time critic Erik Piepenburg actually questions whether Polone and Walker “wanted to prank audiences, not actually terrify them.” The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee called the movie “awkward” as the film is “too straightforward and dumb to work as a crime thriller, yet too dull and scare-free to work as a horror.” All of this leads to a take-down more brutal than anything in the movie from Culture Mix’s Caral Hay, who writes:
“The moronic slasher flick Psycho Killer is a cinematic trash dump of plot holes and huge unanswered questions.”
While it could just be a case of critics looking for something deep and meaningful from a crowd-pleasing horror movie throwback…audiences mostly agree that Psycho Killer doesn’t please anyone. From complaints of “horrible CGI” to “generic plotting,” the majority of viewers have been just as dismissive of the movie as critics, with one even calling it the “worst horror movie I’ve ever seen.”
In a time when Hollywood is attempting to fight the march of AI-generated movies, Psycho Killer seems to have arrived as a reason why AI chatbots probably couldn’t do much worse than some of the most generic films being put out by some creatives that have proven to be among the best in the business. Psycho Killer opened on Feb.20 to a first day box office of $250,000 against its budget of $10 million, suggesting this is a movie that will eventually find its home in the dark corners of streaming in the near future. You can read our review of Psycho Killer here.
Release Date
February 20, 2026
Runtime
92 Minutes
Writers
Andrew Kevin Walker
Producers
Andrew Kevin Walker, Matt Berenson, Roy Lee, Arnon Milchan
Georgina Campbell
Jane Thorne
James Preston Rogers
Psycho Killer