Harefooted Halloween: Psycho II

What I Liked: Anthony Perkins’ (Murder on the Orient Express) performance is pretty good.  At first he seems too plain but as the movie progresses you see a nice transformation regressing back into madness.  He has an innocent boyish charm like someone who hasn’t finished growing up (the ol’ mother’s doing no doubt) but he can flash just the right amount of wild eye to make you feel uneasy.

I gotta admit the story idea is interesting.  They found a way to continue the Norman Bates tale without rehashing the original film and I’ll give kudos for that.  I can’t go into it because of spoilers though and this will play better if you don’t know what’s coming.

However, spoiler on this last point

Like T2 and the Undisputed sequels it’s cool how they flipped the good guy and bad guy roles around here.  I really felt for Norman and thought Lila (Crane) Loomis (Vera Miles (The Searchers)) from the first picture was a mean bastard despite the fact that Norman tried to kill her twenty three years ago.  It’s so weird how a filmmaker can manipulate how you feel about any character and you’ll accept it.  They got me.

What I Didn’t Like: Meg Tilly (The Big Chill) is pretty bad in this.  Her acting is so wooden with no emotional change in any situation.

Does anyone else think it’s strange that they let Norman out of prison because he’s totally not insane anymore even though he murdered seven people (we actually only see two in the first movie, I guess he did some other murdering before those took place)?  He still owns the house and the motel somehow too.  I feel like that isn’t right and after doing a quick Google search I think the government would seize this guy’s property.  I understand the filmmakers needed to use the same locations so people would recognize them and get excited but it doesn’t make very much sense.

There’s too much use of the overhead shot.  There were those two iconic ones in the original so I get the reference but why quadruple the number of them?

Initially this was going to be a TV movie and that cheap feel carries through a bit.  Almost the entire thing takes place in the house and anything outside of that was done on a backlot, the effects don’t look so hot (especially the killings), it’s shot pretty uninterestingly for the most part and etc.

The movie opens with the infamous shower scene from the first one and that was a bad decision.  I can understand the urge to put it in because home video was still in its infancy back in 1983 so a lot of folks probably either hadn’t seen that scene in a long time or had never seen it on the big screen before.  But it adds nothing to the sorta unique film they ended up making and it violates one of my golden rules: never show a good movie in your crappy movie.  It’s distracting as all hell and will make a number of people wish they were watching that other movie instead.

Overall Impressions: You’d think a sequel made over twenty years later to one of the best and most beloved (horror) films of all time would be total garbage but shockingly it’s not.  I mean this isn’t a forgotten gem or anything but there are a bunch of neat ideas in here that take a more nuanced approach than I think anyone could’ve expected.  It would’ve been so easy to just make a gory slasher picture like was the hot trend at the time.  They did make some accommodations for the modern audience (teens smoking a joint and making out, one particularly nasty death where the knife goes through the mouth and out the back of the head, etc.) but not a ton.  And the callbacks to the original are fun to spot (there’s a lot too).

I’d say this is worth checking out.  It’s more of a hybrid psychological thriller-slasher which is hard to come by.