PG: Psycho Goreman
“PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN” WILL PREMIERE EXCLUSIVELY ON SHUDDER ON MAY 20, 2021.
Is the new thing in sci-fi/horror the idea of kids getting their hands on an alien, and not just befriending it, but helping it cause chaos? At its heart, Steven Kostanski’s “Psycho Goreman” is a twisted riff on “E.T.,” with the extra-terrestrial being a homicidal monster bent on revenge rather than left on Earth alone. I can get behind that, but for some reason, the tone in “Psycho Goreman’s” approach to that idea doesn’t really work for me. That doesn’t make it a poorly made film, though; just a disappointing one.
The title cards set the stage for the intergalactic monster at the center of this film, a wicked warrior whom went on a rampage across the galaxy before he was entombed on Earth millions of years ago. One day, Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and Luke (Owen Myre) are in the backyard playing a game (which is, essentially, a riff on dodgeball), and Luke loses. His punishment is to dig a hole in the ground so that Mimi can bury him alive; seems fairly harsh, but as he’s digging, he comes across, naturally, the entombment of the monster, as well as a gem to control him, which Mimi promptly takes. The alien awakens, ready to rampage, but the whims of children must be sated, including giving him a new name- Psycho Goreman (or PG for short). It isn’t long before those who defeated PG before are aware of his being awoken on Earth; he must be dealt with before he can harm more people.
I like this premise. It’s a fun riff, and a funny fish-out-of-water idea where children are in control of a destructive monster. When I asked if this was a new thing in the genre, I asked because I feel as though I’ve seen this idea before a few times recently. (Jeremiah Kipp’s upcoming feature “Slapface” has something of a riff on this, but I know there’s at least one more like “Psycho Goreman” that I’m just not thinking of right now.) The fact that children essentially are controlling a verifiable killing machine should be great fun; unfortunately, that only works if the kids are engaging. Mimi is insufferable, and constantly bullying Luke, and that makes her being the child in control of PG really difficult to stomach for 95 minutes. (For the record, Luke is not that engaging, either. And the less said about their parents, who might be my least favorite in a film since “Transformers,” the better.) I like the way they try to come up with a name for PG, I like them trying to explain their “not dodgeball” game to PG, and I like how they don’t really resolve the fact that one of their friends, Alasdair (Scout Flint), is transformed by PG into a walking brain. If the human characters in a movie like this don’t work for a viewer, though (as they don’t work for me), it’s really hard to get past that.
Even if Kostanski is unable to get the film to land with me in being engaged with that characters, I do enjoy the look and feel of this film. This is one of several films recently that look to capture the aesthetics and tone of ’80s sci-fi/horror, and “Psycho Goreman” does that fairly well. I love the makeup effects in this and the creature designs. There’s a layer of absurdity to the way this world works that is endearing. And you cannot really go wrong with a score like this one has. Maybe if the human characters hadn’t been such an annoying bunch for me, I might have felt like what the rest of the movie is doing worked as a whole.
