Psycho Goreman: Splatterfest with Midnight Madness DNA mocks galactic blockbusters with bratty kids and cheesy FX
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
With winks at the cheesiness of a previous generation’s entertainment and a razzberry directed at contemporary blockbusters with a thousand times its minuscule budget, Psycho Goreman is an entertaining exercise in low-tech sci-fi camp.
The comically-gory $1.98 mash-up of Avengers films and My Pet Monster (with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers style FX), Psycho Goreman couldn’t land at a better time, coming on the heels of Marvel’s own exercise in self-mocking, WandaVision. The less seriously people take this stuff, the better.
Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) bosses her galaxy-destroying bodyguard around in Psycho Goreman.
Canadian director Steven Kostanski (The Void, Manborg) takes what is by now a trope – muscly, galaxy-destroying bad guy is released from eternal imprisonment, and seeks an all-powerful object to fulfill his galaxy-destroying destiny – and he lards it with wisecracks, and an absurd premise. The fact that Peter Kuplowsky, programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness series is a co-producer, tells you plenty about the movie’s vibe.
As outlined in a verbose crawl of the sort first made famous by Star Wars: A New Hope, a “nameless evil” from the planet Gigax (a shout-out to the late Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax) has been imprisoned on Earth for aeons, and his release would lead to “certain death for all existence.” (I should mention purple prose is Psycho Goreman’s chief special effect.)
Although this suggests the aliens who previously defeated him might have sealed him underneath Mount Everest, it turns out the nameless evil is buried in the suburban backyard of siblings Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and Luke (Owen Myre). Also buried there: the Gem of Praxidike, the all-powerful McGuffin of this movie.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Being released is the good news for the nameless one. The headstrong, bullying Mimi getting her hands on the Gem is the bad news. Seems it gives her power over the soon-to-be-named one (to his consternation, Mimi and Luke name their new pal “Psycho Goreman,” PG for short).
This is where any pretense of Psycho Goreman taking itself seriously flies out of orbit. PG (played by Matthew Ninaber and voiced by Steven Vlahos) is practically on a leash, and vowing to serve up the most horrible of deaths to the family upon his release (said family includes a slacker dad and a disgruntled mom). An unimpressed Mimi gets PG to do her dirty work, and seems utterly unfazed when he gets carried away and annihilates passers-by or turns one of their friends into a sort of ambulatory brainlike blob.
The kind-of-mean Mimi is hard to love. In, say, ‘80s Hollywood, nice-guy Luke would be the one given control over the Destroyer. But Kostanski turns soft-heartedness on its head in Psycho Goreman. When the sarcasm and comic relief doesn’t drown out any “teachable” moments, the splatter-fest that is the movie’s third act washes the sentiment clean.
Turns out, the parties involved in the war against the nameless evil were PG’s Paladins and the Templars, who are not so nice either, and are headed to Earth under the command of Pandora (Kristen MacCulloch). Both sides are odd-looking lots, and the cartoonishly bloody battles, when they break out, are kind of like a Gwar concert with exploding heads.
There are really no lessons to be learned in Psycho Goreman, except that sometimes the good guys are just as bad as the bad guys. And some things we take seriously are really sophomoric - even when they gross a billion dollars - and worth laughing at.
Psycho Goreman. Written and directed by Steven Kostanski. Starring Nita-Josee Hanna, Owen Myre and Kristen MacCulloch. Opens Friday, January 22 in theatres where open, and streaming via: iTunes, Cineplex, Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus & Vimeo.