Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Night of Terror #5: 'Psycho II'

I've been on a bit of an Anthony Perkins kick lately. I got to see Psycho on the big screen at the beautiful Paramount Theater in Austin, along with my girlfriend who had never seen it before. She really liked Perkins in it, which I of course used as an excuse to check out a bunch more Perkins movies. I rented The Black Hole. I watched Winter Kills again. And tonight I checked out a movie I'd read about but had never been interested enough to watch before now: Psycho II.

The reviews for Psycho II all seem to express the same sentiment: "It's not as bad as it could have been." There are few movies with the same iconic power as Psycho, so it's pretty much a given that a sequel made more than 2 decades after the original wouldn't come close to matching it.

Now that I've seen Psycho II, I'm going to go out on a limb and say: Yeah, the critical/audience consensus matches up with my thoughts on the movie. What I wasn't expecting was how delightfully batshit it ends up being. I particularly like a scene towards the end involving Anthony Perkins and a shovel. It is what you're thinking.

What I WAS expecting was the gory kills compared to Hitchcock's original. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but there's one scene involving a certain "old Hollywood" actress that made me a little uncomfortable. Alright, fine, I'll spoil Psycho II: It's Vera Miles getting a knife shoved down her fucking throat!

One more stray observation before I call it a night: It's somehow magically bizarre seeing the old Bates Motel and house in color after spending so much time watching Psycho and seeing it in black and white. It doesn't even feel wrong, exactly, just strange and surreal. Maybe they could have done more with that, I dunno.

No comments:

Post a Comment