If you took all the most outrageous, colorful, graphic, and/or bloody scenes from movies by Brian DePalma, Dario Argento, Park Chan-Wook, and Takashi Miike, then randomly edited them together into a feature-length experience, you’d have a fair approximation of Psychopaths, the newest horror movie by Mickey Keating (Darling, Carnage Park).

Psychopaths starts off with killer Charles Starkweather (Larry Fessenden) ranting directly to the camera, and, you know, us, that upon his electrocution his evil will be spread out upon the world, causing even more mayhem and murder. And then he is electrocuted. And then even more mayhem and murder occurs.

And that’s, seriously, just about all the background we get before we are treated to various psychopathic characters doing various psychopathic things to various people: a man wearing a plastic mask of a boy buries his victim, only to discover his victim is not quite dead yet; a man with a magnificent handlebar mustache cruises the boulevard looking for a streetwalking victim only to have the tables turned by a needle-wielding blonde; a schizophrenic asylum escapee who imagines herself as a 1950s ingenue attacks a couple having marital problems. Occasionally, these characters (and more) cross each other’s paths in tangential ways, but more often these are stand-alone scenes that are intercut with each other to make a rising tide, a tsunami of weirdness and cruelty that crashes over and over.

Mickey Keating is a terrific director, his movies always full of inventive camera moves and saturated color and odd characters. He is not afraid to pay homage to directors he loves and admires (and, frankly, he often gets away with a lot more than just homage, sometimes flat-out pilfering favorite shots), and it’s all done with respect and admiration.  His actors are uniformly on top of their game, even greasy cop Jeremy Gardner who has to make the line “It’s alive!” seem fresh and natural even on his tenth screaming of it. Special kudos to Ashley Bell as the asylum escapee who sometimes carries on conversations with herself in the mirror when she’s not stabbing. She is equal parts sweet and sinister, a flashy role that she keeps under her very capable thumb.

The makeup effects by Mikal Sky, and Josh and Sierra Russell, are gruesome and realistic, even to the point of me, a seasoned gorehound, wincing at a few exceptionally painful parts. But did that make any of the characters any more sympathetic or interesting? Unfortunately, not to an appreciable degree.  There were some interesting twists (Ah, that one’s really a contract killer! This one is now the prey instead of the pursuer!) but nothing that made me care much about the people on screen, which is a shame because every single other film Keating’s made featured many characters to relate to and root for and sympathize with.

I’m sure this is exactly the movie the Keating wanted to create, and there are some purely adrenaline-fueled moments that are worth seeing, if only on a visceral level. I enjoyed and appreciated the somewhat experimental nature of it, and I think you will too. It’s definitely better than I thought it might be, but not quite up to what I expect from Keating based on his previous work. Uncle Mike still sez check it out.