Tag Archives: Robert Bloch

Psycho II (1983)

Posted on October 13, 2024 | 2 comments

psycho2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Norman Bates comes home.

After 22 years of being confined to a mental institution over the murders of 5 people Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is now deemed to be no longer a menace to society much to the protest of Lila Crane (Vera Miles) whose sister Marion was one of his victims. With nowhere else to go Norman returns to the old house that he shared with his mother and tries to restart his hotel business that had been run while he was incarcerated by Warren (Dennis Franz) who had allowed the place to be turned into a flophouse for drug users and is immediately fired. To help bring in an income he gets a job at a nearby cafe as a cook where he meets Mary (Meg Tilly) who works there as a waitress. The two quickly start-up a friendship and when Norman learns that she’s broken-up with her boyfriend and no place to stay he offers a bedroom in his house for her to sleepover, but soon Norman starts receiving notes and even phone calls from someone perpetuating to be his mother and then murders begin occurring by someone dressed as an old lady. Has Norman gone back to his old homicidal ways, or is it someone else trying to make it look like it’s him, so that he’ll be rearrested and sent back to prison?

The attempt to make a sequel to the Hitchcock classic had been discussed for years and apparently even the master himself had considered it, but the studios generally nixed the idea figuring there was just no way to upstage the first one. Then Robert Bloch, who written the novel that the first one was based on, came out with a second installment also called ‘Psycho II’ that was published in 1982 that helped spark new interest in the franchise. However, the book’s plot was far different than this one. In the novel version Norman escapes from the mental institution while dressed in a nun’s outfit and then hitches a ride with another nun whom he kills and then rapes. After absconding with her van he then picks up a males hitch-hiker whom he plans to kill and then use his body to fake his own death. Police later find the burning van and charred remains, but are unable to identify who it is. Meanwhile across town a movie is being made about Norman’s life and Norman’s psychiatrist fears that Norman is going to go there to kill everyone in the production, so he decides to become a ‘technical advisor’ to the film to help watch out for the crew, but while there he starts to become more worried about the film’s director who’s a spitting image of Norman from 20 years earlier and he reveals an unhealthy infatuation with the actress playing Marion Crane.

While I found the book to be highly creative the studio execs disliked its satirical elements regarding the movie business and discarded it while hiring Tom Holland, who had some success with the 1978 horror TV-Movie ‘The Initiation of Sarah’ and also the screen adaptation of The Beast Within to write a script with a more conventional storyline. While this story isn’t bad, I personally liked the Bloch version better, this one does have some logic holes mainly around releasing someone who’s killed several people from well published crimes and clearly suffering from a severe mentally ill state and yet somehow convincing the parole board and public at-large that he’s now ‘cured’, which really pushes the plausibility meter. The film also portrays Norman as being a likable guy just trying to find his way, which is awkward since the viewer is technically supposed to be fearing him, but half the time ends up sympathizing with him instead and this dueling dichotomy doesn’t work.

The acting though is terrific especially Perkins who makes his portrayal of Norman into an almost art form and the most enjoyable element of the movie though he initially was reluctant to recreate the role complaining that it hurt his career playing the part in the first one and it had caused him to become typecast, but when he found out that they were planning to cast Christopher Walken in the part if he rejected it he then decided to come-on board. Dennis Franz is also a delight as nobody can play a brash, blue-collar out-of-shape ‘tough guy’ quite like him and his taunting, loud-mouth ways help bring an element of dark humor to the proceedings.

Spoiler Alert!

My favorite though was Meg Tilly who helps tie all the of the craziness around her together by being the one normal person of the whole bunch. Reportedly she and Perkins did not get along and she refused to attend the film’s premiere though the frostiness of their relationship doesn’t show on the screen and the two end-up working well together. The only thing that I didn’t like was the misguided twist of her turning out to being the daughter of the Vera Miles character and in cahoots with her in her attempt to drive Norman crazy. For one thing if this were true then it should’ve been Meg instigating the idea of her moving into the house with him versus Norman coming up with the idea and her seeming reluctant.

The film has some good creepy camera angles of the home, which seems even more frightening here especially with the way it’s isolated desert setting gets played-up. There’s also a couple of gory killings, which I liked, but the second-half does drag and the movie could’ve been shortened by a good 20-minutes. However, the film’s conclusion where Norman learns the his mother’s sister, played by Claudia Bryar, is actually his real mother and she was behind the recent murders was a perfect ironic angle that took me by surprise and I loved it. Why he would then proceed to kill her with a shovel I didn’t really get as it seemed they could’ve started-up some weird bond and became a homicidal couple, which would’ve been more frightening, but still it’s a cool twist either way and helps make this a decent sequel.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: June 3, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 53 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Richard Franklin

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

2 Comments

Posted in 80's Movies, Horror, Movies with a Hotel setting, Sequels

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Psycho (1960)

Posted on October 11, 2024 | 3 comments

psycho

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 9 out of 10

4-Word Review: Don’t take a shower.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who works as a secretary at a real estate firm, steals $40,000 in cash from her boss (Vaughn Taylor), who trusted her to take the money to the bank, in order to help her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin) pay off his debts. As she’s traveling to where he lives she encounters a rainstorm causing her to take the nearest exit. There she drives into the lot of a isolated lodge called Bates Motel, run by a young man named Norman (Anthony Perkins) who’s still living with his mother in an old rundown house that sits ominously on a hill behind the hotel rooms.  Norman becomes immediately smitten to the woman, who signs the hotel ledger under an assumed name, and invites her to have dinner with him in the hotel office. Marion, who sees him as a awkward, but otherwise harmless guy who’s still dominated by his mother, agrees. After they eat she departs back to her room and takes a shower when what appears to be his mother, who considers all women to be ‘whores’, stabs and kills her. Norman then cleans-up the evidence by submerging the dead body and her car in a nearby swamp. Soon a private detective named Arbogast (Martin Balsam) begins investigating the case and what he finds out leads Marion’s boyfriend Sam and her sister Lila (Vera Miles) to the property where they’ll unravel a shocking secret.

The film, which at the time was considered ‘too tawdry and salacious’ to be made into a movie and thus the studio refused to give director Alfred Hitchcock the required funding and forcing him to use his own funds and crew to produce it, was based on the novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. Bloch began writing it in 1957 when coincidentally in the neighboring town not more than 35 miles from his came to the light the criminal activities of Ed Gein who killed two people while also digging up dead bodies and then skinning them in an effort to create a ‘woman suit’ he could wear so he’d ‘become his dead mother’ who had dominated him for the majority of his life. Rumors were that Gein’s crimes had inspired the book, but Bloch insisted that he had almost finished with the manuscript before he became aware of the real-life case and then became shocked with how closely it resided with his story.

While the film follows the book pretty closely there are a few differences. In the book the Marion character dies from decapitation while in the movie it’s from stab wounds. The Norman character is described as an overweight man in his 40’s while in the movie he’s thin and in his 20’s, which I felt was an improvement as it made more sense why Marion would feel less guarded around him and put herself in a more vulnerable position than she might otherwise as she still viewed him as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ kid. It also helps explain why Norman blunders his interview with the detective and virtually incriminates himself because he was too sheltered and not worldly-wise enough to handle pressure situations.

The film is full of a lot of firsts. It was the first to show a toilet or use the word transvestite, but what I really liked though is that it takes a different spin on the character of the victim. Typically, even today, victims are portrayed as being virginal and angelic beings particularly women, but here it works against that. Right away with the opening scene in the hotel room we see she’s definitely no virgin and what’s more she’s having sex outside of wedlock in an era where ‘good girls saved themselves for marriage’. Having her then be susceptible to corruption by stealing from her employer, or not feel frightened initially by Norman and even superior to him further works against the grain of the ‘sweet, fragile damsel in distress’ cliche and makes her seem more human since she’s not perfect and vulnerable to the same vices as everyone else, which in-turn gives the more an added darker dimension.

The film’s hallmark though is its memorable camera work from a close-up of the victim’s unblinking eye, still not sure how Leigh could’ve kept her eyes open for as long as she does, to the interesting way the house gets captured from the ground looking upward on a hill towards the sky with the creepy night clouds floating behind it.  My favorite one though is the tracking shot showing Norman walking into his mother’s room and then having the camera stop right at the top of the door frame and then spin around towards the hallway as he then leaves the room and carries his mother down the stairs. The only shot that I didn’t care for is when the Martin Balsam character gets stabbed at the top of the stairs, but instead of immediately falling over backwards and then rolling down the stairs, which is what would happen 99% of the time, he instead somehow ‘glides’ down an entire flight of stairs backwards while remaining upright and only finally falling to the floor once he hits the bottom, which goes against the basic laws of physics and to me looks fake and goofy, but other than that it’s a classic and still holds-up amongst the best horror movies made.

My Rating: 9 out of 10

Released: June 16, 1960

Runtime: 1 Hour 49 Minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

3 Comments

Posted in 60's Movies, Black & White, Classic, Horror, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a Hotel setting

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