Siblings Mimi and Luke unwittingly resurrect an ancient alien overlord. Using a magical amulet, they force the monster to obey their childish whims, and accidentally attract a rogues’ gallery of intergalactic assassins to small-town suburbia.

The 80’s and 90’s were filled with movies featuring kids interacting with, befriending, and, in some cases, fighting, monsters/aliens/creatures. There wasn’t anything odd about this notion of kids running around all night and interacting with creatures. If you are a certain age, of course this idea didn’t affect you, it reflected your reality. Leaving the house in the morning, playing outside all damn day, with very little substantial contact with adults, eating meals with whichever family you ended up with at meal time, and being in somebody’s home at night.

I always liked to call these movies, the Foul Mouthed Kids Riding Bikes genre. Imperfect title but does what it says on the tin. The movie Super 8 resurrected this story type with a little bit of a glossy nostalgia sheen. Most recently, Stranger Things has played in the same sandbox.

Psycho Goreman runs this idea in a different direction. Why assume there will be a wholesome budding friendship with the alien you just discovered. What if you found a killing machine, a destroyer of worlds. This makes sense, because at the same time that we were watching all of these kids and monsters movies, we were also hitting the video store unsupervised and renting the shit out of gory horror movies that were rising in popularity at the time.

The other big piece of Psycho Goreman is the Japanese genre Tokusatsu, or Toku for short. Toku’s are live action SF/F/H movies and TV shows that use a lot of special effects. There is some overlap with the Kaiju genre but they aren’t exactly the same. Some of the most popular Tokus are probably Power Rangers, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman.

Psycho Goreman perfectly blends all of these styles and aesthetics and still manages, in its own way, to be (somewhat) wholesome.

Psych Goreman is a self-aware movie. It knows what it is and sets out to tweak and play with any established conventions while also hitting all the marks of those said conventions.

There’s tons of great practical effects, usage of miniatures, and stop motion and other techniques. The creature designs and costumes are some of the best that I’ve seen recently.

Then there’s Mimi. Mimi is a horror icon for the new millennium and your new favorite characters, even if you don’t know it yet.

Psycho Goreman is a total blast and very much worth checking out.