Psycho Killer Plummets to Rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes
Big pedigree, weak scares: despite backing from the producer of Weapons and The Long Walk and the writer behind Seven, the new horror release lands with a thud.
A horror film with this much pedigree should at least clear the bar. Instead, Psycho Killer face-plants. On paper, it is stacked: the writer of Seven, a producer behind Zombieland stepping into the director chair, a powerhouse producer team, and a lead from Barbarian. On screen, it is a 0% critics score factory. Sometimes the math just does not add up.
The pedigree that set expectations sky-high
Psycho Killer arrives with the kind of creative lineup that usually spells problem solved. Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, penned the script. Longtime producer Gavin Polone (Zombieland, Cold Storage) makes his feature directing debut. Roy Lee, coming off Weapons and The Long Walk in 2025, is on the producing roster. As for recent touchstones, this crew counts wins like Late Night with the Devil and those two 2025 standouts among their collective past credits.
- Cast: Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) as a Kansas highway patrol officer; Malcolm McDowell, screen legend, in support
- Writer: Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven)
- Director: Gavin Polone (producer on Zombieland and Cold Storage), making his first feature as director
- Producers: Including Roy Lee (Weapons, The Long Walk)
The story
The title does not hedge its bets. Campbell plays a cop whose husband is murdered, and she turns that grief into a singular mission: catch the killer. The trail leads to a sadistic serial murderer with a bigger, uglier plan and a level of depravity designed to make you recoil. That is the idea, anyway.
The reception: brutal
Rotten Tomatoes has it at 0% with critics and 31% with audiences. That is not a bump in the road; that is a ditch.
"Wanted to prank audiences, not actually terrify them."
"Awkward... too straightforward and dumb to work as a crime thriller, yet too dull and scare-free to work as a horror."
"The moronic slasher flick Psycho Killer is a cinematic trash dump of plot holes and huge unanswered questions."
That tone carries over to viewer reactions, which hammer the movie for plastic-looking CGI and paint-by-numbers plotting. One person even called it the worst horror they have ever sat through. When the crowd and the critics line up like that, the verdict is loud.
Why the disconnect?
Horror loves a good trope, and plenty of movies win by embracing familiar beats and then sliding the knife with something new. Psycho Killer never finds that gear. With this lineup, the expectation is craft, surprise, or at least a nasty little momentum. Instead, it plays flat: a straight-arrow revenge chase that never builds tension and never lands the scares. The movie keeps telling you how twisted it is; it rarely shows it.
Box office reality check
The film opened on Feb. 20 and earned $250,000 on day one. Against a $10 million budget, that trajectory points to a quick jog to streaming. The irony is rough: while Hollywood argues about AI-made content, this one becomes a talking point for why assembly-line storytelling feels like a machine already beat you there.