"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Georgina Campbell’

Psycho Killer

Thursday, October 15th, 2026

PSYCHO KILLER (2026) was written by Andrew Kevin Walker (BRAINSCAN, David Fincher’s THE KILLER), so obviously it was advertised as “FROM THE WRITER OF SE7EN.” But it’s not that type of movie. It reminded me more of HIGHWAYMEN – an odd, mostly quiet, sometimes audacious serial killer thriller, with a determined protagonist chasing a mysterious weirdo across the country. Its tone is grim and serious while its premise invites you to take part in satanic panic, and maybe if I thought it was trying to convince me that was real I would be bothered by it. Like if it came from Angel Studios. But I was not bothered. I had fun with it.

If you’re expecting something like SE7EN, the cool opening titles don’t necessarily dissuade you. I checked and they are not designed by Kyle Cooper/Imaginary Forces, but by Alexei Tylevich (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2022, BARBARIAN, REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE, and ALIEN: ROMULUS). Their film scratches and strobes may owe a debt to Cooper’s work, but they’re tinted red to tell us this is the Devil variant. We see pentagrams, pills, bullets, inverted crosses, negative images of newspaper articles with headlines like “WAVE OF HORRIFIC MUTILATION.”

These are a few of the title character’s favorite things. The movie opens inside his noisy car roaring down the highway, close up on his mirrored glasses (we will never see his face). Played by 6’ 6” ex-WWE wrestler James Preston Rogers (OUTLANDER, DEFENDOR, BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F, Hulk Hogan in WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY), he’s a big muscle guy with long hair, trenchcoat, boots, sometimes enjoys a custom gas-mask type mask (pretty cool), always has his voice lowered like he’s a whistleblower having his identity protected in a tv interview. That’s even with the mask off – I’m not sure how he does it. (read the rest of this shit…)

Influencers

Thursday, December 18th, 2025

A couple years ago I really liked this horror-thriller I saw on Shudder called INFLUENCER. Yes, I agree with you that movies, and especially horror, are a little too fascinated with social media influencers right now, but I swear this is a good one. Madison (Emily Tennant, SNIPER: ASSASSIN’S END) makes a very good living traveling to exotic places and posting about her adventurous lifestyle, but we see that at least at this time it’s kind of a front. She’s actually depressed and mostly staying alone at a resort in Bangkok, sad that her boyfriend didn’t come.

Then she meets CW, played by Cassandra Naud (IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE), an American expat who has lived there for a while and shows her a good time. Unfortunately for Madison, fortunately for cinema, CW turns out to be a psycho with a resentment toward influencers and the computer skills to really do a number on their lives. I like that the influencer is somehow sympathetic but the villain is still fun. It’s kind of a modern take on ‘90s thrillers like SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, BASIC INSTINCT and THE NET, but also kind of a noir because it mostly follows CW as she gets deeper and deeper into her lies and tries to navigate a smooth exit. (read the rest of this shit…)

Barbarian

Monday, September 12th, 2022

The trailer for BARBARIAN suggests an intriguing and pretty straight forward horror-thriller idea. Tess (Georgina Campbell, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD) shows up at her Airbnb late on a rainy night and discovers that somehow someone is already staying in it. It’s a scary neighborhood on the outskirts of Detroit, so the other renter, Keith (Bill Skarsgard, ATOMIC BLONDE) lets her come in while they try to figure out what’s going on. They can’t get ahold of the owners, so she sneaks a photo of Keith’s driver’s license (just in case) and reluctantly accepts his offer to take the bedroom while he sleeps on the couch.

He seems very polite and cute, but of course that’s a reason not to trust somebody in a movie like this. Plus the motherfucker played Pennywise! So when weird shit starts happening and she finds a scary secret door in the basement you try to figure out if he’s up to something or if they’re both in trouble together or what. And you can sort of see where it would go from there.

Or that’s what it seems like. One question: why BARBARIAN? Why not, like, OVERBOOKED or SCARE BnB or whatever? Well because it goes a little further off that set up than you might expect, and I’m glad I heard that because it inspired me to go see it opening day. (read the rest of this shit…)