PG: Psycho Goreman — the third feature film by writer-director Steven Kostanski, best known for his 2016 effort, The Void — opens on sibling protagonists, Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and Luke (Owen Lyre) preparing to launch into a game of “Crazyball”, a sport of their invention. The stakes: winner becomes champion of the universe; the loser gets buried alive. “That’s fair,” deadpans Luke.
The game begins. Crazyball lives up to its name. It plays like a demented mashup of dodgeball, quidditch, and gladiatorial combat. The rules are so convoluted they could only have come about through years of revision (likely at the behest of some healthy sibling bickering). Mimi and Luke barrel around the backyard, screaming threats, throwing the balls at each other with as much verve as they can muster. The score, by Canadian trio Blitz//Berlin, swells — triumphant, epic — this game is everything. Then we cut to a long shot. From a distance, the scene looks absurd; just children blustering around the backyard wrapped up in their own world.
It’s a joke we’ve seen a thousand times before, but it still lands. It is also the entire point of the movie. Psycho Goreman is loaded (to the point of being a tad burdened) with influences. There’s a bit of B-movie here, some 80’s sci-fi horror there, some rubber suit villains in the vein of classic Power Rangers, and a generous amount of Saturday morning cartoon plotting. But where the influences are being pulled from matters less than how they are tied together. Psycho Goreman operates on playground logic, that brand of freewheeling play where, as a child, you and your friends pretended to be the heroes of your favorite show: devising original storylines, shooting imaginary bad guys, brandishing sticks and calling them swords. In this way, Psycho Goreman plays like a hard-R version of The Boss Baby. Both are love letters to the way children play, the only difference is in Psycho Goreman when one of the children flippantly says something explodes, something actually explodes.
Your ability to buy into Psycho Goreman rests largely on your willingness to accept the philosophy driving every creative choice in the film, someone asking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Wouldn’t it be cool if, while digging a hole to bury your brother alive in, you discovered a glowing alien gem? Wouldn’t it be cool if that gem summons, and allows the wearer to control, a psychopathic world-destroying creature who calls himself “The Archduke of Nightmares” (Matthew Ninaber)? And wouldn’t it be cool if The Archduke of Nightmares — renamed Psycho Goreman by Mimi: “It’s fun, it’s hip, it’s now, it’s wow” — was the veteran of a millennia-old rebellion against a tyrannical cyborg-race, led by a dictator named Pandora (Kristen MacCulloch), and that by awakening him, Mimi and Luke have brought that conflict to Earth?
For a while Psycho Goreman manages to skate along just fine, relying on the “rule of cool” to deliver a series of sketch-like scenes with enough humor, violence, and (frankly gorgeous) production design to keep the momentum going. Unfortunately, coolness can only carry you so far. At a certain point, you realize you’re halfway through the film and the plot hasn’t really started yet. There’s plenty of compelling material floating around. Mimi and Luke’s parents’ marriage is on the rocks, suggesting that maybe adopting an alien monster is just their way of acting out. But this subplot, like so many others, is introduced only for it to be shunted to the narrative margins. When forced to choose between making yet another nostalgic homage or a strong storytelling choice, Psycho Goreman always goes for the former. There’s plenty of fun to be had with Psycho Goreman; it is kitsch, camp, and joyfully lo-fi. But you can’t escape the feeling that it is perhaps a bit too successful in its goal of capturing childhood imagination run amok. Children may have enthusiasm and imagination to spare, but there’s a reason we don’t let them make movies.
