He
is known as “The Party Killer” and he is a real Brooklyn slasher. In this case,
he is both a killer of Brooklynites and a psycho-stalker who happens to be from
Brooklyn. At least he deserves credit for killing some of the most annoying
victims ever in Maxwell Frey & Derek Gibbons’ Psychotic! (trailer
here), which
screens during the inaugural Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
If
you needed one more reason to avoid Bushwick, the Party Killer should certainly
suffice. We will see exactly how he gets his name when he kills Shannon right
smack in the middle of the birthday party she threw for her boyfriend Bill, the
bass player in Stuart’s band. Since then, Bill has been a little uptight,
whereas Stuart has always been ragingly insensitive. The inevitable conflict between
them results in Stuart getting kicked out of the band he started.
Stuart’s
square Craigslist roommate “Old Dog” Tim also wants him out, but fortunately he
is preoccupied with stalking his old girlfriend. Stuart is quite smitten
himself with sarcastic Roxy, but she is probably too cool for him.
Unfortunately, he presumably left his wallet, keyboard, and weed at her place
(but admittedly his memory is a little fuzzy on that score). As Stuart and Tim
pursue their self-involved Seinfeld-esque
lives, people in their social circles keep getting killed. Yet despite all the
corpses, there never seem to be any cops around. This is indeed de Blasio’s New
York.
Frey
& Gibbons wear their Giallo love on their sleeves, but when it comes to
satirizing the Italian horror genre, they can’t lay a patent leather glove on
Astron-6’s The Editor. There is an
awful lot of time devoted to the band and its internal discord, which might be
very Brooklyn but tries our patience. Frankly, despite ostensibly tweaking BKLN
hipster pretensions, Psychotic! often
leaves us even more exasperated with Kings County denizens.
