PG: Psycho Goreman is a film which pays homage all over the place. Whilst watching, I found myself thinking of all of the following: Jase and the Wheeled Warriors, Mac and Me, Power Rangers, Tokyo Gore Police and Bad Taste. It’s clear that director Steven Kostanski is both an ardent nostalgist and an SFX fiend; PG Psycho Goreman is, however, a very straightforward story really, which has its own mythology but yet (with some handy on-screen text) tells us a tale of good vs. evil where Earth has become a prison for a very bad entity who tried to take over the universe. This is a fun film, though I really regret not catching it at a festival screening because it feels tailor-made for that kind of – few-beers-in, not too much heavy plot to deal with, entertainment which is amplified by the presence of other film fans -vibe.
After we’ve established that the very bad entity is still imprisoned on earth somewhere, we cut to two kids at play. Older brother Luke (Owen Myre) fails to win at a ball game which him and his sister Mimi (Nita Josee-Hanna) have clearly invented, and his forfeit is – for reasons not entirely clear – to dig a ruddy big hole in the garden. In so doing he disturbs an intergalactic prison box and a mysterious jewel. The kids decide it’s probably best all round to just fill in the hole again, which doesn’t work, and after a few strange lights are seen, the hole mysteriously re-opens again, freeing the entity. The kids track the entity down.
This alien doesn’t have an awful lot of time for humans, but thanks to the gem, he can’t harm them. It seems that this gem is even more phenomenally powerful than that; not only does it prevent the entity from harming them, it also means that he/she/they, soon renamed Psycho Goreman by Mimi, has to obey the children. Great: just what a tyrannical ten year wants, eh? Thing is, this grand reawakening has come to the attention of some more equally-matched forces in a galaxy far, far away – and they might just have to intervene.
PG: Psycho Goreman is indeed another one of those films – to be cynical, yet another one of those films which has opted for a distinctly 80s look and feel, showcasing this in the now canonical ways: you have to make analogue tech part of your screenplay, for example, and the SFX you use should not only be practical (no arguments here), it also needs a certain kind of straight-to-video aesthetic to qualify, but – as these effects are probably fairly cost-effective, whilst having a decent, OTT look, it does mean that a film can add layer upon later of zany, improbable, bloody sequences. Psycho Goreman certainly does. Whilst for practical reasons you could probably say that PG himself is the most derivative monster (a dash of the Gill-man and a dab of the generic husky-voiced demon), there are some really beauts in here, with some great fight scenes and some worthily-excessive feats of design. So there’s a cheap and cheerful aspect, but enough of it to build a fun whole. I found the gore FX far more palatable than Mimi, to be honest: the actor does a great job playing what we could politely call a gregarious child, and it fits in with the generally cartoonish aspect of the film, but my word: Mimi is Very Much, and your ability to gel with this character will probably have a large impact on how you take the film overall.
What I will say, though, is that it’s refreshing to have a film which is as straightforward as this: with the exception of some guff about love, it has no vast and ponderous subtext, no serious points and instead, a proliferation of special effects and spectacle. PG: Psycho Goreman is deliberately daft and, even shorn of a sympathetic festival crowd, it’s a good laugh. If you ever wondered what would happen if you spliced E.T. with Meatball Machine, then here, you might just find your answer.
PG: Psycho Goreman is available on DVD and Blu-ray on March 16th 2021.