Harefooted Halloween: Psycho III

What I Liked: Once again Anthony Perkins (Crimes of Passion) delivers a great performance as a schizophrenic, deranged and disarmingly amiable monster.

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.