Night of Terror #7: 'Psycho III'

OK, so I actually got to watch two scary movies today. One of them was my first-ever movie from the famous Hammer studios, a 60s thriller entitled The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, and Psycho III. I was planning to write about the former since I already covered Psycho II, but it's just not that interesting. Might write about it later if I'm in a pinch.

Psycho III, on the other hand, is VERY interesting. Anthony Perkins directs as well as stars, and he's looking a lot craggier than in Psycho II, which was made 3 or 4 years earlier (I do these write-ups fresh, no research, like Larry King. Think of me as the Larry King of short-form horror movie blogs). The movie's a lot different, too. Where the first Psycho sequel opted largely for Hitchcockian classicism with a few contemporary jolts thrown in, Psycho III is closer to a full-blown horror movie, complete with creepy/pretentious religious imagery. The most jarring example of this aspect of the movie is a scene in which Norman, dressed as his mother, is taken as a vision of the Virgin Mary by an attempted suicide victim.

I don't think the religious stuff works particularly well, Perkins seems to have lost most of the perverse charm he has in the first two movies (especially the first, obviously), and Jeff Fahey's (!) character takes some really weird and unexplainable turns, but there are some things in the movie that work great. Two set-pieces in particular will probably stick in my brain for quite a while. The first is a murder scene in which the famous shower of Hitchcock's original is replaced with a phone booth. The murder itself isn't really the interesting part here, since it's mostly standard-issue slashing and gushing. The memorable part is the lead-up. I don't want to spoil it too much, but I think it suffices to say that the poor girl who gets killed had a pretty sad and poignant last few minutes on Earth. The second memorable set-piece is a lot funnier, and it has to do with a dead body Norman has stashed in the motel's ice machine, of all places.

Like I said in my Psycho II post, I'd never really been interested in the Psycho sequels before now. But I can definitely say they're worth seeing, particularly if you can open up your mind to the very notion of a Psycho sequel. Which is what I had trouble doing, but I'm glad I was finally able to do it.

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.