Good production design with the house looking grimier than
ever, there’s one cabin with all these nude pictures cut out from magazines
taped to the walls and the gnarled mother looks like something straight out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
I really like how stylishly shot the entire thing is. This is Perkins’ directorial debut (he would
only direct one other movie) and he goes for dramatic neon lighting, lots and
lots of shadows, nice Dutch angles and he came up with some different scene
transitions like when Norman goes to leave a hospital room the doorway he
passes through turns right into his mother’s room. This reminds me of a couple of the Saw
sequels where the same technique was used.
I didn’t like it so much in those films but I found it novel this time.
The story picks up a month after Psycho II and that
was smart. We get to find out what the
consequences were of all the shit that went down and this plot progression
remains engaging. It makes sense and grounds
the movie in reality more. If we had
picked up three years later like we are in real life we would be left wondering
what Norman had been up to all that time and why he decided to brandish the
knife at this moment.
What I Didn’t Like: There’s a bunch of very stupid
80’s stuff in here like a fair amount of nudity, a terrible sax tune during a
sex scene, obnoxious teens wreaking havoc at the hotel, a few gross out moments
like when Jeff Fahey (The Lawnmower Man) kisses Norman’s mother’s
grizzled corpse and so on.
Don’t know if I would say this is necessarily a bad thing
but I just wanted to point out that there’s a helluva lot of overdubbing in
this thing. I don’t know what went wrong
or if that was a conscious decision (doubtful) but it’s strange.
Overall Impressions: I gotta congratulate Perkins on
a job well done. There are so many neat
little touches like Norman obliviously mixing taxidermy stuffing material into
his peanut butter and eating it, a quick shot of the book a character from the
previous installment was reading lying on the ground in the weeds, a blood
curdling scream of “There is no God!” kicking the whole thing off and the many
nods to the original which should feel contrived by now but most come off like
cool Easter eggs.
There’s more of the mother in this one than ever before and
she’s a frightening character. We almost
never see her face hidden in the shadows and that gives her a real eerie
presence. Norman struggles like mad to
deal with her but can’t get her out of his head. And that one abrupt shot of Norman dressed as
the mother with a creepy huge smile is an amazing moment similar to Christopher
Lee’s shocking closeup reveal in Horror of Dracula.
This is a good companion piece to part 2. If you liked that one then you should
definitely check out part 3. I actually
dig it more. They may have gone slightly
more in a conventional slasher direction but there’s plenty to make it stand
out. Wow, never would’ve guessed I would
like Psycho III this much.
But what the fuck is that poster? It’s like for a Psycho satire. Man that’s shitty with the cartoon Norman
Bates looking frisky. No wonder this
bombed.
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