Let’s go back to that dialogue thing for a paragraph. Why do they always do that in sequels and prequels? Are we really supposed to be delighted that you don’t come up with new shit for the characters to say? When Norman saw the blood in the original that was a great reaction. Now we’re supposed to believe he’d already said it before, that it’s the traditional thing he says after every murder? And what about when he uses the phrase “Not inordinately”? If this wasn’t a reference to the original it would actually be a good piece of characterization, showing that as a teenager Norman had an above average intelligence that made him awkward around his peers. But no, he says it because Marion Crane also says it in the future. Great.

But as much as I don’t think it’s that good of a movie, there are some things that really work. Henry Thomas was a great choice to play a young Norman Bates, if we have to see one. He’s a great actor, doesn’t seem Hollywood at all and has the vulnerability and lankiness the character requires.

More importantly, I gotta give credit to Olivia Hussey as Norma Bates, the reason for all this. Without her Norman would’ve been an ordinary motel clerk and not the horror icon he became, so let’s acknowledge our debt to Norma. Hussey was good casting because it’s not at all what you’d expect. What I’m getting at is that Mother is much more attractive while alive. With that hair bun and ragged voice I always pictured pre-mummification Mother as a mean old hag, but Norman’s obsession makes so much more sense when you see her this way. She’s pretty, creepily sensual with her son, sometimes nice, often emotionally cruel. She’s also clearly mentally ill. One of the sadder and more disturbing scenes is when young Norman spies on his mother through the hole in the wall in cabin 1. You expect to see her having sex with some sleazeball (maybe I’ve watched too many Rob Zombie movies) but instead she’s alone, having a violent fit, smashing things.

The sex stuff is less interesting. She gets mad at him for getting a boner and makes him dress up as a girl. After her death he murders a cute girl who tries to have sex with him. More of that sex=death stuff we get in so many movies. Not that interesting.

Original PSYCHO screenwriter Joseph Stefano returns, but he has Mick “Stephen King TV movies” Garris directing, and not to be controversial or contrarian or anything but – just in my opinion only – I believe Mick Garris is not of the same caliber as Hitchcock. Just my  2 cents.

I should mention what the story’s about. An older looking Perkins (a few years before he died, and knowing he had HIV, wanting to close the circle I guess) plays Bates, a free man again, and wisely having moved to a new house away from the motel and the old stuffy things that remind him of his mother. I would say “mother(s)” except this one seems to ignore all that other mother business that came up in the last one. No, we see him being raised by Norma Bates.

Wait a minute, how the fuck did he get out already? This was made in 1990, by the movie timeline it’s 7 or 8 years after he got caught for a bunch of murders. The mental health system here really needs some work.

Anyway, Norman’s favorite radio show is doing an episode on matricide, so he calls in to give some insights. He calls himself “Ed” (Stefano’s way of saying “I’d like to give a shoutout to the Butcher of Plainfield!”) and tells his story, at which point it flashes back to the Thomas/Hussey scenes.

It all feels kind of inert, because we know the broad strokes of his backstory, just not the details. Like hey, how’s this for a twist? We’ve known since 1960 that Norman killed his mother by poisoning her tea. What we learn in this one is that it was iced tea! Makes sense, because this is California, not England. Take that, Hitchcock. And she liked it with drops of vanilla in it. How would we ever have truly understood Norman Bates if we didn’t revisit this shit? If we even considered his mother’s iced tea preference at all we would’ve guessed maybe a lemon slice or something, but never drops of vanilla. You need a prequel if you’re gonna know that.

By the way, as part of my pursuit of excellence I tried making iced tea with drops of vanilla and drank it while writing this review. Not sure if you can tell, it might give the sentences that extra edge or something. Didn’t taste that great though, I’m not sure it works.

The only mystery to keep you in suspense is who Norman plans to kill. The talk show host and her guest (Dr. Leo Richmond, the doctor from the explanatory last scene of PSYCHO, but not played by the same actor) try to do detective work to figure out who he is, but of course we already know who he is so this isn’t too compelling to watch.

Well it turns out who he plans to kill is (SPOILER) his wife, and the reason is because she’s pregnant. He doesn’t want his mother’s “bad seed” to live on in some other poor bastard, and he especially doesn’t want Mick Garris to be able to do a mini-series about Norman Bates, Jr. Once the movie reaches the climax and starts dealing with this it’s kind of hokey, but I give it a pass because at least we’re back to the idea of Norman’s rehabilitation and realizing what he is and trying to be better, at least in his own sick way. (I wonder if he has considered abortion, though? I know it’s not pleasant, but he should try to talk her into that before jumping straight to murder. I guess maybe he’s pro-life.)

In the end, Norman thinks better of it and says “I’m gonna get rid of the past once and for all” and sets the house on fire. This leads to a pretty laughable sequence of him stumbling out of the burning building haunted by the images of all the people he’s killed (this movie only). But it’s true, that was it, the end of the series, not too long before the end of Perkins’ career. He got to go back to the beginning and then wrap it all up and have kind of a hopeful ending. And that really was the end of PSYCHO… until that remake by Gus Van Sant. But that’s a subject for another day.

[ratings]

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In my opinion part 3’s not quite as good as the previous one, but it has plenty of good touches. It’s directed by Anthony Perkins himself (his first time, and the only other thing he directed was the comedy LUCKY STIFF). It starts out with an homage to VERTIGO in a whole Technicolor-looking sequence involving nuns in a bell tower. A suicidal nun (Diane Scarwid) who has lost faith in God runs away and eventually finds herself at the Bates Motel. Seeing her short blond hair and the initials “M.C.” on her suitcase, Norman just about has a heart attack when his sleazy new employee/singer/songwriter Duane (Jeff Fahey, later in DARKMAN III) puts her up in cabin 1, where he killed Marion Crane all those years ago. (This is 1986 now but it’s supposed to be 22 years later, a few months after part 2. There aren’t any lines like “have you seen that new movie that just came out called E.T.?” to give it a period feel, but they do say that Marion Crane was 22 years ago.)

Well, you know Norman, so next thing you know he’s looking through the peephole at this poor sister getting naked by the shower and then he’s dressing up in his mother’s clothes and busting in there to stab her… but he finds that she’s in the bathtub with her wrists slit. So that kind of throws him off his game. He had this crossdressing/stabbing-in-shower deal down pretty good because he did it that time before but she throws him a curveball like that and everything changes. I mean even if you believe yourself to be your dead mother (alleged biological this time, long story) how the fuck you gonna murder somebody right after they killed themselves? It just doesn’t work. So he calls time out and brings her to the hospital, saves her life. And in her delirium, she sees him with the wig and the knife, thinks she sees the Virgin Mary holding a silver crucifix.

I don’t know about you guys but I didn’t see any of that coming. The movie peaks early, but that’s okay. Like a nice nun, I forgive it. That’s just an incredible turn of events, so I give great credit to screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue (same guy who wrote Cronenberg’s THE FLY. And, uh, DRAGONHEART. And KULL THE CONQUEROR.)

Part III follows from the twist ending of Part II, which was a great way to end that one but unfortunately sort of sets this one up to be more of a rehash of the first one. Suddenly he has a mummified mother again, giving him orders. So after that great first act it’s not quite as interesting. One of the murders takes place in a phone booth. That seems a little self-conscious, like “Hitchcock made people afraid to go in a shower. What sort of common confined space should we make people afraid of?”

Some interesting things happen. Norman almost falls in love. The motel gets busy during a big football game – wouldn’t it be cool if the movie was mainly just about trying to do a good job running the motel? Hiring a new cleaning staff and training them and stuff? Maybe not. The dead mother gets kidnapped, that was pretty cool. A reporter is investigating Norman because she thinks he killed a local waitress – true, but it’s funny that she doesn’t realize this nice old lady she’s concerned about was the killer in part II. And there are more convoluted secrets to be learned at the end.

There’s alot of dry humor in this one, so it’s enjoyable, but it’s much less excusable than part II. Part II was such a reversal of the original, because you know who he is and root for him to get better. In this one you know he’s gone from the beginning (if you forgot from Part II you’ll notice when you see him poisoning birds so he can practice his taxidermy on them) and he’s going around slashing people. So he seems more like the generic ’80s multiple murderer the studio and marketing people probly would’ve liked him to be at the time.

But it’s not bad. It’s pretty good. I enjoyed it. Perkins is still good (though a little broader), Fahey is a really funny sleazeball character, and the weird nun storyline helps.

I gotta take away points for the very end, though. It seems like kind of a deranged happy ending, because Norman stabs the taxidermied body of his other mother (long story). Oh God, Mother! Sawdust! Sawdust! And they lock him up again for the murders they now know he did, but he’s okay with this because he’s finally free of his mothers.

I mean, that’s a good ending there. Taken away in handcuffs, probly won’t ever get out, and he’s like “Phew, thank God.” Unfortunately then they go too far by showing him in the backseat of the cop car smiling crazily while petting the severed hand that he’s somehow snuck in with him. What, is he a magician now? And they didn’t frisk him? I shouldn’t hit on the phoniness too hard because that’s not the problem, the problem is that it ditches the character arc they had going in favor of a dumb shock.

Other than that though PSYCHO III is a pretty solid part III.

[ratings]

It’s 22 years after the events of PSYCHO. Norman Bates has been in an institution, having been found not guilty by reason of insanity, but is now considered fully rehabilitated. Against the petitioning of Lila Loomis (formerly Crane, and still played by Vera Miles) Norman is released. His doctor (Robert Loggia) seems to truly care about and believe in his mental stability, but regrets that cutbacks prevent society from having more social workers to look after him. For Norman’s sake and for ours.

So Norman returns to the scene of the crime, the Bates Motel still in operation, run by Dennis Franz and mostly used by prostitutes and junkies. To stay in touch with humanity or something Norman is set up with a job at a small nearby diner, where he meets young Mary Samuels (Meg Tilly). When she gets in a fight with her boyfriend and has no place to stay Norman tells her about how he owns this motel with plenty of vacancies.

Ah shit, Norman! Not this again. I know you mean well. I know you’re genuinely trying to help this girl. But what the fuck, man. If you’re an alcoholic you shouldn’t hang out at bars, if you’re on a diet you shouldn’t go to the all you can eat buffet, and if you’re Norman Bates you shouldn’t invite pretty young girls to stay in cabin 1. That’s just how it is, man. Don’t tempt yourself.

Of course he starts thinking about mother, he starts seeing things. Is he losing it already? Is someone trying to make him lose it? If so will he actually lose it? There’s plenty of things to be tense about in this movie.

Tarantino has infamously said he likes it better than the original, but he’s just showing off. He’s allowed to do that because he directed a bunch of great movies, but I haven’t done that so I’m not gonna go that far. I do think you could argue that it holds up better as a suspense-creating-machine, just because of the particular mysteries it holds and the less iconic status it has in pop culture. I always remember what happens to Marion and what you find out about Norman at the end of PSYCHO, but somehow this is the third time I watched part 2 and I couldn’t remember the details. So it kept me guessing until the end. And it’s a great ending.

What makes it great though is this time you know from viewing #1 that he’s a psycho, and you root for him anyway. According to some people (both critics and fans) ’80s horror was all about cheering for Jason to kill stupid characters you didn’t like. But here’s one that’s all about rehabilitation and second chances. You want Norman to prove people wrong by staying sane and not killing anybody. Come to think of it that would be pretty cool if there was a Jason movie where he had gone through years of therapy and now he’s just working as a landscaper or something and trying to keep his urges in check. That’s a freebie, Platinum Dunes, I’m sure you can do something with that.

The only messed up part is that poor Vera Miles comes across as a bad guy. That’s not really fair, I mean the guy did murder her sister. It is kind of weird though that she married her sister’s boyfriend after bonding with him over trying to find her when she was missing with the money. And that she apparently (SPOILER) gave her daughter the same fake name that Marion used to register at the motel with when she was murdered. But I’m not gonna judge her. She’s been through alot.

I’m so glad they didn’t just give PSYCHO II to some chump. Instead they got Richard Franklin, the great Australian director who was more obsessed with Hitchcock than even Brian De Palma. If you haven’t seen it yet you really should see his “what if REAR WINDOW and DUEL fell in love and had a baby?” movie ROAD GAMES. That was the best of many gems I saw during my recent Australian film marathon. Franklin apparently pushed writer Tom Holland (director of CHILD’S PLAY) really hard. He talks a little bit about it in this interview Mr. Beaks did for The Ain’t It Cool News.

PSYCHO II is an honest to God great sequel, because this really is a character you want to find out more about, and it makes perfect sense for it to take place all this time later when he returns to society. It’s completely respectful of the original while having a very different feel just from being made in a different era, on color film, and with the audience already knowing Norman’s story. It goes to show that you can’t be a purist about everything. You can imagine the fury that would go on in talkbacks if somebody proposed making a sequel to a Hitchcock classic now. But here’s a case where they would’ve been wrong.

[ratings]

The weird thing about watching PSYCHO is that after you’ve already seen it (which in my opinion you have) the biggest trick is already given away. I’m not talking about the ending, the solution to the mystery. I’m talking about the fact that about half of the movie is all mis-direction… Marion Crane is unhappy, so she takes off with $40,000 of her boss’s money. Is the cop onto her? Will her boss know where she went? Will she decide to give it back? In a normal Hitchcock movie it might be about the money, but we know it’s not about the money. The money is not even the mcmuffin, it’s the red herring. We know not to really get invested in this because there is a little matter of something that happens in a motel shower that makes the money irrelevant. We know that and we still watch it again and again.

But with this hindsight we can also notice other things going on: the talk of Marion having to turn her mother’s picture around when her boyfriend is there, her co-worker (played by Hitchcock’s daughter) talking about her mother calling to check up on her… everyone has a mother lingering in their life from afar, overseeing things. But not quite like Norman does.

We’ve seen clips and photos and references and parodies of the shower scene almost as many times as we’ve seen Mickey Mouse, so it’s hard to get scared by it anymore. But when you see it in context it’s so much more. Most of its scare power has been squeezed out by familiarity, but it’s easy to forget that there’s more going on here before the stabbing. Forget about what’s about to happen and watch the look on Marion’s face as she cleans herself. She has decided to give the money back and she’s cleansing her soul. She feels good about it. And it’s actually her conversation with Norman that brought her to that decision. If he could just control these freaky urges he would’ve had a positive influence on her life, the dumb bastard.

On the latest fancy DVD of PSYCHO they included audio of Truffaut interviewing Hitchcock about PSYCHO. One thing Hitchcock says is that he’s very proud of the movie not for its content or acting but for it technical artistry, that for that it’s perfect. And he’s right, but what he’s missing is that without Anthony Perkins in that role it might not be the classic it is. He’s so perfect and so unlike other performances of the era. There’s nothing cliche about the way he plays crazy. He’s handsome, but skinny and a little weird. He’s awkward and sad, but also funny and likable. He’s even a little effiminate at times, which makes me wonder if that’s why Hitchcock wanted him for the role. If the stories are true then Perkins was hiding something himself. I suspect Hitchcock thought that would help. Or maybe he really didn’t give a shit about actors, like he claimed, and it was just a lucky coincidence.

At any rate, there’s something about that character that made him an American icon. I mean, as many great characters as Jimmy Stewart played for Hitchcock you never saw him coming back years later to show you the further adventures of that character, and I don’t think there was any demand for it. Although I guess I would’ve watched ROPE 2 and 3 where he solved other murder mysteries during what seems to be one continuous take.

My favorite acting in the movie is the way Norman nervously chews while being interrogated. He’s shot in profile and a little spot on his cheek keeps pulsating. It’s an obvious tell, but the funny thing is he doesn’t even know what he’s lying about. He thinks he’s covering up for something his mother did. He knows that’s bad but he has no idea how freaky the thing is that he’s actually hiding.

The book Psycho and the movie THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE were both loosely inspired by the real life killer Ed Gein, who dug up his mother’s body, killed some neighbors and ate parts of human bodies. CHAIN SAW rubs your nose in the gruesome horror show of it all, and takes advantage of how hard it is to understand what the fuck would make a human mind come up with that. I mean, nipple belts? I never. PSYCHO takes the other half of the coin, the side that kept it all hidden. Gein was not that much of a recluse, he knew people in town and they thought he was just a slow guy with a weird sense of humor. They had no idea.

Norman Bates is much more appealing. He seems like a nice guy, you feel sorry for him, even watching it knowing what he’s up to. He’s the killer but the movie lets us see him as a victim too, because he can’t control this other personality that he thinks is his mother. If he could control it he would. There wouldn’t be a problem here, and I’m sure he would do a good job of managing the motel. The Bates Motel would get pretty decent user reviews online, I think. “The manager even invited me up to his house for milk and sandwiches. Just a real friendly, family-run place, and quiet because it’s away from the freeway. I’d stay there again if ever visiting the greater Fairvale area.”

I’m telling you guys, watch PSYCHO. It has a real “mother” of an ending, but I won’t give it away. All I will say is that chick is no chick.

[ratings]

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