Psycho II (1983)

 

Director: Richard Franklin

Screenplay: Tom Holland

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Loomis, Meg Tilly as Mary, Robert Loggia as Dr. Bill Raymond, Dennis Franz as Warren Toomey, Hugh Gillin as Sheriff John Hunt, Robert Alan Browne as Ralph Statler, and Claudia Bryar as Emma Spool

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

How do you follow up a legacy defining film? After Alfred Hitchcock passed in 1980, thus screenwriter Tom Holland, future director of Fright Night (1985), and Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames (1981) in Australia and openly an admirer of Hitchcock, had this challenge ahead of them when they collaborated on a Universal Studio’s follow up of Psycho (1960), with Anthony Perkins two decades on returning as Norman Bates. The opening reuses the legendary shower scene from the first film in the opening, but the Jerry Goldsmith score sums up the tone perfectly for a different film.

This does a good job in avoiding a poor rehash, with a plot to its credit playing to an idea, gas lighting someone, Hitchcock did use. Norman Bates is still a sympathetic figure, despite being a murderer, now with the context he has been rehabilitated, back at Bates Motel with all the repressed memories, those which caused his psychosis, and the potential vilification by the outside world as likely to prevent him ever atoning for his sins. Neither is it helping someone is trying to torment him, even with notes said to be left by his mother. With Dean Cundey as the director of photography, this feels like a grand film, when sequels existed but were not inherently expected for every title which were huge successes, and could be disasters regardless of genre and especially if the expectations of the original’s acclaim were at stake, something which can be attest to with the response to Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). As an attempt to credibly follow up the original Psycho, presenting its own drama even if with awareness and influence of the slasher film boom Psycho itself helped inspired, the sequel does well. It is strange seeing Norman Bates near a Pac Man arcade cabinet, but that is as much the point, a man out of time from a film that hit like a lightning bolt, even among the heavy hitters of Hitckcock’s filmography, and returning in the midst of horror movies inspired by it.

What Psycho II is a horror film with the emphasis on a strong cast, provided with a weight for its thriller plot and having some gruesome scenes in the wake of Friday the 13^th films. No one is giving a bad performance, Perkins about to return for a surge of recognition in this role that would lead to films like Crimes of Passion (1984), matched by the likes of Robert Loggia as his therapist, to Meg Tilly as a diner waitress who ends up at the old Bates home as a friend, subverting the original film in a willing guest of the hotel alongside both a shadow of doubt there for her and additional context that will pull the rug out of their relationship. The slasher influence is there – one scene befits the era, of a young guy and girl making the unfortunate decision to get high and heavy pet in the Bates home cellar – but what this becomes is closer to something you would find in an Italian giallo, the kind of storytelling influenced by Hitchcock too, especially as you have to factor in Vera Miles, in an inspired choice, returning as Lila Crane/Loomis, the sister of Janet Leigh’s character switching roles with the irony of hindsight, now the concerned person who wants Bates to stay in jail even if it leads her to doing something legitimately evil morally to punish him.

The film does recreate images from the first film, even the psychoanalyst explaining the plot at the end of the prequel, so there is the real sense of this being a film made by fans of the source returning to it. They have a Herculean challenge in a way – Hitchcock is a sacred figure, and barring one or two exceptions, a TV movie The Birds II: Land's End (1994), or Christopher Reeve post his tragic accident starring in a 1998 TV remake of Rear Window, readapting his work has not happen a great deal unless entirely out of coincidence. Psycho was an exception, and the sequels and re-adaptations are their own universe, where Anthony Perkins would direct one of the films, and there was a cancelled attempt to turn the series into an anthology series, by way of an unsuccessful 1987 TV movie, with a young Lori Petty. Barring one aspect which may be very controversial, a final twist about Bates’ family which I will not spoil, Psycho II does not take huge risks but does an admirable job in being a retrospective on Norman Bates himself, whether it would be possible to ever live a normal life, and succeeds when making a sequel to the Alfred Hitchcock film could have been an ill-advised mishap.