Brought to you by the letter R There's gore, there are toxic monsters... but hey, why not make it a kids' movie? By: Randall King Posted: 3:00 AM CST Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021

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This article was published 16/01/2021 (2030 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When it comes to bloody mayhem, the movie Psycho Goreman lives up to its title. Heads are ripped off. Humans are blithely transformed into toxic monsters. And the title character, an extraterrestrial super-warrior, is given to threatening people with dark fates along the lines of: “You will suffer an eternity for this.”

The kicker is that the movie, for all its R-rated content, focuses primarily on the two kid siblings who find themselves controlling the title character through the mystical amulet that had been embedded in his chest. In particular, Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) gleefully lords it over this dark lord (and even gives him his name, “PG” for short) while her acquiescent brother Luke (Owen Myre) goes along for the wild ride.

Former Winnipegger Steve Kostanski, who wrote and directed the film, is unsure of how the film is rated before its release next week.

“I hope it gets an R rating,” he says in a phone interview from his Toronto home. “Otherwise the joke in the trailer — ‘PG, rated R’ — doesn’t really work.”

Yet Kostanski, 34, a member of the celebrated Winnipeg genre film collective Astron-6 (The Editor, Father’s Day) perversely intends the film for a juvenile audience, reflecting his own experience of enjoying the R-rated forbidden fruit of his own neighbourhood video store — Video King in Fort Richmond — when he was a lad. (”I still have a Robot Jox poster I got from there.”)

“My core intention was I wanted to make something that a kid would watch — maybe at a sleepover, and your friend’s cool parents would say, ‘Hey watch this movie because it’s fun,’ — without realizing that it’s R-rated.

“And then they would have that experience that we all had growing up maybe watching a thing that isn’t totally suitable for kids,” Kostanski says. “They spark your imagination because they’re fun and crazy and colourful, in the way that I was inspired by like Terminator 2 and Army of Darkness — movies that have all the trappings of the stuff the kids would love but are for adults.

“I just wanted to capture that experience of my youth, watching these movies that were a little too intense for me and I was a little bit traumatized.

“But I think those scars also contributed to my passion for filmmaking, because those movies affected me so deeply,” he says, adding that he feels a need to fill the void when it comes to the low-budget genre fare he enjoyed in his youth.

“I really feel that there isn’t enough stuff like this out there right now, that’s like sci-fi/fantasy/action/comedy. I feel like it’s just disappeared in the past decade or so,” he says. “I guess the Marvel movies are kind of filling that space, but it doesn’t leave room for the low-budget fare.”

(The budget of Psycho Goreman was a mere $850,000.)

“I wanted to bring some of that spirit back to the movies because I don’t really think we have that right now — really imaginative genre fare that’s super ambitious despite its low budget.”

The film also serves to showcase Kostanski’s love of practical special effects, which these days are manifest for his work at the Toronto company Masters FX, where Kostanski has created work for the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy and the Amazon series The Boys. Kostanski gained expertise in that realm in his Astron-6 films, especially Manborg (2011), which he directed. He has since divided his time directing films, such as The Void (2016) and Leprechaun Returns (2018) with his special effects work.

The visual effects remain sufficiently important that Kostanski plans his film’s schedule around them.

“We actually split the shoot into two blocks. The first block of about 10 days was shot in November 2018. That was mostly creature stuff that wasn’t cast-dependent,” he says.

“And then it was April the following year the principal photography was done,” he says, adding that the bulk of the film was shot on location in St. Catherines, Ont.

“It’s my preferred method of doing stuff, because I don’t like rushing those kinds of things,” he says. “It’s nice to be able to do all the gags at my own pace and not have a full crew of people standing around waiting around for us to get this blood gag just right.”

Psycho Goreman will be available on VOD, including iTunes, Cineplex, Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus & Vimeo, commencing on Friday, Jan. 22, as well as a run via Cinematheque at Home.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing