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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THE NEXT MISSION was made for TV in 1985. It’s supposed to take place about 6 months later, but Lee Marvin has aged 18 years. Somehow they got Marvin, Borgnine and Richard Jaeckel all to come back. They have a new mission with a new Dirty Dozen including Ken Wahl and Sonny Landham.

Alot of the movie, especially the first half hour or so, just made me sad. Marvin’s age is really showing (this was his next to last movie) and he just doesn’t seem like he’s into it at all. They make poor Lee and Ernest rehash the whole Borgnine-pitching-the-mission sequence and the Marvin-recruiting-the-convicts one and they even use whole chunks and paragraphs of the exact same dialogue as in the original. Then Marvin will say things like, “That sounds familiar.”

This was 1985, when plenty of people had VCRs, but I guess maybe they still figured you hadn’t seen THE DIRTY DOZEN in a long time, and by exactly redoing it but with worse acting and camerawork they would make you would think “ah, what a pleasant reminder of yesteryear!” But if you watch the two back-to-back like I did I’m pretty sure you’ll agree that there’s nothing pleasant about it.

Also there’s a part where they re-use an 18 year old shot of Marvin driving up to a building. It’s so obviously not from the same film stock it kind of reminds me of on a sitcom when they cut to an exterior shot of a city to pretend this isn’t all shot on video on a stage in front of an audience. Come on man, that footage is old enough to vote. Just rent a fuckin jeep and re-do it.

THE NEXT MISSION is maybe an hour shorter than THE PREVIOUS MISSION, so they skip over the rivalry and war games and go straight to the mission, which involves the takeover of a train and the shooting of a Nazi general who might be planning to assassinate Hitler. Once it gets more into the specific preparations and the mission itself it becomes more enjoyable because it’s not exactly the same as before, and that’s probaly why Marvin starts to get more lively and enthused. He does the numbering and rhyming for all the stages of his plan like in part 1, but otherwise it’s semi-new material. For example it introduces the idea of him getting the Dozen’s cooperation by telling them there’s gold on the train. I’m not sure what book or movie started that one. They used it in NAM ANGELS though.

The big moment is when the sniper gets the target in his sights, but Hitler is there too so he’s tempted to kill him instead. Lee Marvin has to talk him out of it. That’s a dilemma usually reserved for time travelers who have the chance to stop the Holocaust but don’t want to fuck up the future in some unforeseen butterfly effect type of way, like there was no WWII but super-intelligent Yetis now control all of Asia and Europe or that kind of thing. This has nothing to do with that. The thinking, as explained by Borgnine during a golf game, is that Hitler’s incompetence will end the war soon, but if he dies now this general would take command and the war would stretch on for years. And I mean how many more dozens is Lee Marvin gonna want to train?  Shit, just one year and he’ll be 99 years old at the rate he’s aging. This war needs over with.

Landham doesn’t have much to do, Wahl plays a racist dick, and whoever is playing the Savalas crazy type is a horrible actor. But by the end I was a little more involved in it, so I kind of liked seeing how it ended up. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the very end, when the survivors crash land a stolen Nazi plane, still wearing Nazi uniforms, and an English farmer tries to take them prisoner. Reisman uses his American accent to tell the farmer he’s done a good job, puts his arm around him and heads for the nearest pub to buy him a pint.

Since this was made for TV you could compare it to DTV. They wanted a sequel but not enough to pay for a real one. But actually it was higher profile than DTV because back then there weren’t as many channels, so I’d bet more people saw this than picked up CARLITO’S WAY: RISE TO POWER. I don’t know if this was made because of all the Vietnam-related mission movies of the time. Same year as RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, but I’d guess it was a coincidence. The director, Andrew V. McLaglen, actually did the men-on-a-mission movie THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE back in ‘68 and THE WILD GEESE in ‘78. He also did that Joe Don Baker movie MITCHELL that the Mystery Science nerds like to make fun of, and after this one he did another TV sequel, RETURN FROM THE RIVER KWAI. The writer, Michael Kane (no relation), wrote SOUTHERN COMFORT. And JAWS 3-D. And SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II.

The completist in me enjoyed seeing this, but I gotta tell you the quality is somewhere between the original DIRTY DOZEN and the average A-TEAM episode. And it kind of bummed me out to see Marvin getting decrepit. He had grey hair for most (all?) of his acting career, so you always think of him as a capable old guy. Here he’s finally showing his age.

Luckily it’s made for TV so it doesn’t count. On second thought it’s admirably honest to use this as a mere bonus feature, and maybe even good marketing. Remember when they put Cronenberg’s THE FLY on DVD as a double feature with THE FLY II? Good value, but I think people were happy when they later released them separately. They’d rather pay more to not have THE FLY II written on the cover. Same goes for THE NEXT MISSION. Just check the bonus disc if you’re interested.

[ratings]