A group of hard-partying Brooklyn hipsters are stalked and savagely murdered by a masked maniac known as the Bushwick Party Killer.

It’s Bill’s surprise birthday party, and we’re all invited! His girlfriend/love of his life Shannon is running around, making sure that all the guests are in their proper hiding place for Bill’s arrival. Unfortunately, there’s also vicious killer hiding in the apartment, too. Soon enough, someone is stab-stab-stabbed and goes face-down into the cake. The Party Killer strikes.

This opening scene is great fun, and really speaks of major potential for the rest of the movie. The music has a heavy 80s vibe, like John Carpenter and Jay Chattaway had a baby and that baby got a keyboard for Christmas. There are split screens à la Brian De Palma showing two locations at once, P.O.V shots through the killer’s eyes, and one bad-ass butcher knife. I was totally stoked during this opener, looking forward to 87 minutes of bloody retro fun as these friends are picked off one by one. Let’s get some popcorn and Milk Duds!

Oh sweet squiggly Cthulhu, was I wrong. So, so wrong. After that first promising ten minutes, this movie crashed and burned hard, killing all survivors along with most wildlife within a 5-mile radius. Scene after scene of bad, unnatural acting, coupled with unrealistic almost non-sequitur lines of dialogue that go nowhere and weird directing choices that seem to emphasize the absolutely wrong aspects of it all quickly make watching this a tedious experience.

Shall I elucidate? We have dialogue like, “Baby, it’s guys’ night in midtown,” and, “Take your panties off and sing like a man from time to time.”  In the right hands, these might be hilarious bits, delivered with a wink and a twist of irony. But these are not the right hands.

Characters wander from apartment to apartment, just waltzing in (I guess people in New York don’t lock their doors anymore?) delivering the dialogue in scenes but hardly ever pushing the story forward. On second thought, maybe a lot of this movie wasn’t written so much as improvised, because there are a number of times where the actors just stare at each other silently, almost daring the other person to come up with the next line.  Actors literally wiggle their eyebrows, bug-eyed, and bite their knuckles to show they’re nervous. Some friends are in a band in which the members don’t appear to have ever learned how to play their instruments or learned how to sing.

Okay, credit where credit is due: there is an awesome death (of a real asshole character, so double win!) where a glass bong is stabbed into the victim’s stomach, and then the killer takes a few hits off of it, using the bubbling blood as bong water. I chuckled, admiringly, when I saw that. If the rest of the movie had displayed even a small percentage of that goofy fun, my review would have been way different.

As it stands, I cannot recommend this movie much at all.  Which makes me kind of sad, actually. I’m always willing to give low-budget retro genre films the benefit of the doubt a little more than usual in hopes of finding that diamond in the horror rough, but this thing just wore out its welcome too soon.

Catch PSYCHOTIC! on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, Sony PSN, Xbox, as well as special screenings at the Nitehawk Theater in Williamsburg on the 25th, Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint on the 26th, and Videology on the 27th.