Summer of Blood: Where Norman has gone before
Psycho II being an actually good movie was about as unlikely a miracle as any I have ever encountered in all the annals of unnecessary sequels. To expect that kind of miracle to happen twice in a row would be far, far, far too much to hope for, and indeed, Psycho III - which I would have called "impossible" prior to 1983, and "inevitable" after it - comes nowhere close to the level of its direct predecessor. At the same time, it's still better than I would have ever supposed a follow-up to the revolutionary 1960 thriller Psycho could have possibly been under any circumstances, particularly one that is so obviously giving in to the rules of 1980s slasher movies, a trap that Psycho II had largely danced around.
Though I am already not giving Psycho III its due credit for being a weird, tetchy object. The first thing to note about the film is that it was directed by star Anthony Perkins (his directorial debut, no less), from a screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue, and that definitely means something, though not necessarily the things you might expect. It does not, for example, mean that Perkins's signature character, the psychologically fragile murderer Norman Bates, gets a richer and more complicated emotional journey, with more opportunities for the actor to show off all his skills in a variety of different scenes. In fact, I'd say without much hesitation at all that the Norman of Psycho II was a meatier and more rewarding role than the Norman of Psycho III, and Perkins was doing more with the character last time.
Having Perkins in the big seat does mean, as it very often does when actors make their directorial debuts, that he's giving his cast a huge amount of slack, and this results in some extremely variable acting, not just between different actors, but within individual performances, including Perkins's own. We get a taste of this right at the start, even before the first image: "THERE IS NO GOD!" shrieks Diana Scarwid over a black screen, and then the image fades in and we see her in the flesh as Sister Maureen, a soon-to-be former nun standing at the top of an old bell tower, ready to throw herself to the ground in nihilistic despair. "THERE IS NO GOD!" she bellows again, and I have give Scarwid the credit of being utterly fearless here; she's not a little bit scared of looking ridiculous, or holding anything in reserve, or wondering where she's going to go from here. She's in the moment, and the moment involves contorting her face like a dried apple and screaming like she's trying to shred her lungs. And Scarwid, overall, I think is actually giving one of the best performances in the movie, so I'm not trying to bag on her. But I do think that a director willing to push back on her a little bit might have been useful, and might have been useful in several places throughout the film. Psycho III boasts no end of individual acting beats that range from mumbly naturalism to this kind of 110% melodramatic hurricaning, and makes room for a third direction, your basic "this is the best we could do for our slasher movie" style of acting where it doesn't entirely seem like the performers involved had parsed the meaning of their lines of dialogue before saying them out loud.
But even that's not why having Anthony Perkins, rather than the generic "established actor making a debut", direct. Perkins, after all, was a man of intriguing artistic itches, somebody always a bit more enticed by the avant-garde than his position in the cinematic marketplace generally made room for, and it takes that type of person to make the very startling decision that underpins all of of Psycho III, but especially its first half: he decided that he wanted to make this slasher sequel in the style of Blood Simple, back when being a big fan of Blood Simple still meant something. This was so early that one could not even, in those days, call that "a" film by the Coens; it was the film by the Coens. And Perkins saw it and loved it and decided to use it as his template for telling a story of odd people getting all tangled up with murder in the scrubby wasteland of the American West (the rural California setting of the Bates Motel has never looked so much like Texas - it even has a tumbleweed the first time we see it!). So much so that he even hired the green composer Carter Burwell, who'd made his debut with Blood Simple, to write the score for Psycho III.
As excitingly weird as this is, Perkins lacked the Coens' instinctive sense of how movies work (he would later concede that he didn't have the technical knowledge to successfully tackle a feature film), and the film feels less like a marriage of that very particular example of '80s indie neo-noir and the gaudy exploitation of the slasher film, than a strenuous effort to glue things together. The movie plays very much as a grab bag of strange ideas, most of them at least interesting in their own right, but almost never coherent. Perkins' instincts as a director are clearly towards caricature and exaggeration of stock types: I think you could almost squint and call it "camp", if it had more of a detectable sense of humor. I also think it would have been better for him if we could somehow shuffle around chronology to make David Lynch his model, rather than the Coens; there are moments in Psycho III where I had to forcibly remind myself that Twin Peaks was still years in the future, and this film is anticipating (not always well) that show's morbid parody of small town mores.
Anyway, the point being: it's interestingly directed, not the same thing as well directed, but better than a sharp stick in the eye. And that's a good contrast to the script, which is exactly what I was afraid Psycho II would be: trashy fan service and callbacks to the original Psycho, strung along a story that is pretty much entirely a by-the-books slasher film, and since it's 1986, a slasher film with fairly unexceptional gore effects (though there's a distressingly well-done suicide attempt). Perhaps to compensate, it is pervy as hell - I mean, that's kind of built into this series, but it's sleazier here, and more leering. There's a startlingly long scene of female nudity right in the middle. So the point is, seedy slasher filmmaking slathered with explicit hooks back to the 1960 classic - and, unexpectedly, to Hitchcock's Vertigo; that first scene does involve nuns, a rickety wooden bell tower, and a fall to the death. Mostly, these hooks are repeated lines of dialogue, and sometimes Perkins will even attempt to stage those lines using similar blocking to what he did in the original film, and the gap between this and what he did in Psycho II is quite substantial; there, he was playing a 23-years-older version of an iconic character, altered by experience and age and a different narrative context. Here, he's like an aging rock star playing a decades-old hit, reedier and more exhausted and wobbling his way into the notes, no matter how much raucous applause his aging audience dutifully provides.
The actual plot of Psycho III, which hardly matters, is that Maureen - that's Maureen Coyle, since her initials will matter later - has, after declaring God to be non-existent, left the convent. In a confused daze, baked by the desert sun, she hitches a ride with Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey), a wannabe rock start traveling to L.A. "Welcome to the Rapemobile" is not painted on the side of Duane's car, but it's just about the only warning sign that's missing, and soon enough, Maureen has figured this out and she hops out. Duane continues driving to the Bates Motel, where he gets a job doing whatever work Norman - back to his old psycho ways in the wake of the last film - can't find time for. Which feels like it can't possibly be much, but apparently business has picked up. Maureen arrives at the motel not much longer, and this puts Norman in a very bad place: the "M.C." on her luggage, her short blonde hair, and her general demeanor all put him in mind of Marion Crane, the woman whose last act on this Earth was taking a shower at the Bates Motel all those years ago. And so he goes right back to his old behavior, and large chunks of this play out very much as "you liked Psycho? Here's more of it". Meanwhile, a nosy reporter, Tracy Venable (Roberta Maxwell, the one exception to my general rule that the acting wanders from great to bad in the course of every individual performance: she starts terrible and stays there), is convinced that Norman is back to his bad old ways, and she conspires with Duane to prove it. This doesn't play out very much as anything but filler.
Psycho III ends up working or not mostly on a scene-to-scene basis. Perkins is an able enough director of suspense, and there's one unmitigated success of a thriller sequence, when Norman has hidden one of his victims by burying her in ice, right before a cop with a habit of munching ice cubes come to pay a visit. Most of the scenes of Maureen rambling up next to one of the two transparently dangerous men she spends the movie interacting with come to a similar point, largely because Scarwid (giving the film's most consistent performance, though Perkins's best scenes are better than hers) is so deft at playing the character as authentically knocked about and confused, a bit mentally touched in her own right, that her constant looping around into making horrible choices feels more like part of the fog she's climbing out of than the usual slasher movie "don't go there you idiot" material.
So a good enough thriller on its own terms, and by the standard of the genre at the time it was made, that's all it really takes. But then there are the bad scenes: pretty much any time Norman dresses as "Mother", pretty much any time "Mother" talks to him - pretty much every single time the film directly cops an idea or a beat or a shot from Psycho, it just feels suddenly awful, like you can't keep ignoring how tawdry and dumb this is when it tries to position itself directly in conversation with one of the defining films of American cinema. And it does this more often than it probably ought to, so it keeps feeling a bit silly and crass and stupid, and Perkins himself feels like he's treading water in the role of Norman far more than in Psycho II. But, I mean, here we are with a third Psycho movie, and I'm nitpicking problems rather than screaming about how the whole thing should be burned to the ground - the film succeeds far beyond anything within reason, and that ultimately is all there is to it.
Body Count: 5, which actually steps back from Psycho II, a shocking development for a slasher film in the latter half of the 1980s.
Reviews in this series
Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
Psycho II (Franklin, 1983)
Psycho III (Perkins, 1986)
Psycho IV: The Beginning (Garris, 1990)
Psycho (Van Sant, 1998)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Though I am already not giving Psycho III its due credit for being a weird, tetchy object. The first thing to note about the film is that it was directed by star Anthony Perkins (his directorial debut, no less), from a screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue, and that definitely means something, though not necessarily the things you might expect. It does not, for example, mean that Perkins's signature character, the psychologically fragile murderer Norman Bates, gets a richer and more complicated emotional journey, with more opportunities for the actor to show off all his skills in a variety of different scenes. In fact, I'd say without much hesitation at all that the Norman of Psycho II was a meatier and more rewarding role than the Norman of Psycho III, and Perkins was doing more with the character last time.
Having Perkins in the big seat does mean, as it very often does when actors make their directorial debuts, that he's giving his cast a huge amount of slack, and this results in some extremely variable acting, not just between different actors, but within individual performances, including Perkins's own. We get a taste of this right at the start, even before the first image: "THERE IS NO GOD!" shrieks Diana Scarwid over a black screen, and then the image fades in and we see her in the flesh as Sister Maureen, a soon-to-be former nun standing at the top of an old bell tower, ready to throw herself to the ground in nihilistic despair. "THERE IS NO GOD!" she bellows again, and I have give Scarwid the credit of being utterly fearless here; she's not a little bit scared of looking ridiculous, or holding anything in reserve, or wondering where she's going to go from here. She's in the moment, and the moment involves contorting her face like a dried apple and screaming like she's trying to shred her lungs. And Scarwid, overall, I think is actually giving one of the best performances in the movie, so I'm not trying to bag on her. But I do think that a director willing to push back on her a little bit might have been useful, and might have been useful in several places throughout the film. Psycho III boasts no end of individual acting beats that range from mumbly naturalism to this kind of 110% melodramatic hurricaning, and makes room for a third direction, your basic "this is the best we could do for our slasher movie" style of acting where it doesn't entirely seem like the performers involved had parsed the meaning of their lines of dialogue before saying them out loud.
But even that's not why having Anthony Perkins, rather than the generic "established actor making a debut", direct. Perkins, after all, was a man of intriguing artistic itches, somebody always a bit more enticed by the avant-garde than his position in the cinematic marketplace generally made room for, and it takes that type of person to make the very startling decision that underpins all of of Psycho III, but especially its first half: he decided that he wanted to make this slasher sequel in the style of Blood Simple, back when being a big fan of Blood Simple still meant something. This was so early that one could not even, in those days, call that "a" film by the Coens; it was the film by the Coens. And Perkins saw it and loved it and decided to use it as his template for telling a story of odd people getting all tangled up with murder in the scrubby wasteland of the American West (the rural California setting of the Bates Motel has never looked so much like Texas - it even has a tumbleweed the first time we see it!). So much so that he even hired the green composer Carter Burwell, who'd made his debut with Blood Simple, to write the score for Psycho III.
As excitingly weird as this is, Perkins lacked the Coens' instinctive sense of how movies work (he would later concede that he didn't have the technical knowledge to successfully tackle a feature film), and the film feels less like a marriage of that very particular example of '80s indie neo-noir and the gaudy exploitation of the slasher film, than a strenuous effort to glue things together. The movie plays very much as a grab bag of strange ideas, most of them at least interesting in their own right, but almost never coherent. Perkins' instincts as a director are clearly towards caricature and exaggeration of stock types: I think you could almost squint and call it "camp", if it had more of a detectable sense of humor. I also think it would have been better for him if we could somehow shuffle around chronology to make David Lynch his model, rather than the Coens; there are moments in Psycho III where I had to forcibly remind myself that Twin Peaks was still years in the future, and this film is anticipating (not always well) that show's morbid parody of small town mores.
Anyway, the point being: it's interestingly directed, not the same thing as well directed, but better than a sharp stick in the eye. And that's a good contrast to the script, which is exactly what I was afraid Psycho II would be: trashy fan service and callbacks to the original Psycho, strung along a story that is pretty much entirely a by-the-books slasher film, and since it's 1986, a slasher film with fairly unexceptional gore effects (though there's a distressingly well-done suicide attempt). Perhaps to compensate, it is pervy as hell - I mean, that's kind of built into this series, but it's sleazier here, and more leering. There's a startlingly long scene of female nudity right in the middle. So the point is, seedy slasher filmmaking slathered with explicit hooks back to the 1960 classic - and, unexpectedly, to Hitchcock's Vertigo; that first scene does involve nuns, a rickety wooden bell tower, and a fall to the death. Mostly, these hooks are repeated lines of dialogue, and sometimes Perkins will even attempt to stage those lines using similar blocking to what he did in the original film, and the gap between this and what he did in Psycho II is quite substantial; there, he was playing a 23-years-older version of an iconic character, altered by experience and age and a different narrative context. Here, he's like an aging rock star playing a decades-old hit, reedier and more exhausted and wobbling his way into the notes, no matter how much raucous applause his aging audience dutifully provides.
The actual plot of Psycho III, which hardly matters, is that Maureen - that's Maureen Coyle, since her initials will matter later - has, after declaring God to be non-existent, left the convent. In a confused daze, baked by the desert sun, she hitches a ride with Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey), a wannabe rock start traveling to L.A. "Welcome to the Rapemobile" is not painted on the side of Duane's car, but it's just about the only warning sign that's missing, and soon enough, Maureen has figured this out and she hops out. Duane continues driving to the Bates Motel, where he gets a job doing whatever work Norman - back to his old psycho ways in the wake of the last film - can't find time for. Which feels like it can't possibly be much, but apparently business has picked up. Maureen arrives at the motel not much longer, and this puts Norman in a very bad place: the "M.C." on her luggage, her short blonde hair, and her general demeanor all put him in mind of Marion Crane, the woman whose last act on this Earth was taking a shower at the Bates Motel all those years ago. And so he goes right back to his old behavior, and large chunks of this play out very much as "you liked Psycho? Here's more of it". Meanwhile, a nosy reporter, Tracy Venable (Roberta Maxwell, the one exception to my general rule that the acting wanders from great to bad in the course of every individual performance: she starts terrible and stays there), is convinced that Norman is back to his bad old ways, and she conspires with Duane to prove it. This doesn't play out very much as anything but filler.
Psycho III ends up working or not mostly on a scene-to-scene basis. Perkins is an able enough director of suspense, and there's one unmitigated success of a thriller sequence, when Norman has hidden one of his victims by burying her in ice, right before a cop with a habit of munching ice cubes come to pay a visit. Most of the scenes of Maureen rambling up next to one of the two transparently dangerous men she spends the movie interacting with come to a similar point, largely because Scarwid (giving the film's most consistent performance, though Perkins's best scenes are better than hers) is so deft at playing the character as authentically knocked about and confused, a bit mentally touched in her own right, that her constant looping around into making horrible choices feels more like part of the fog she's climbing out of than the usual slasher movie "don't go there you idiot" material.
So a good enough thriller on its own terms, and by the standard of the genre at the time it was made, that's all it really takes. But then there are the bad scenes: pretty much any time Norman dresses as "Mother", pretty much any time "Mother" talks to him - pretty much every single time the film directly cops an idea or a beat or a shot from Psycho, it just feels suddenly awful, like you can't keep ignoring how tawdry and dumb this is when it tries to position itself directly in conversation with one of the defining films of American cinema. And it does this more often than it probably ought to, so it keeps feeling a bit silly and crass and stupid, and Perkins himself feels like he's treading water in the role of Norman far more than in Psycho II. But, I mean, here we are with a third Psycho movie, and I'm nitpicking problems rather than screaming about how the whole thing should be burned to the ground - the film succeeds far beyond anything within reason, and that ultimately is all there is to it.
Body Count: 5, which actually steps back from Psycho II, a shocking development for a slasher film in the latter half of the 1980s.
Reviews in this series
Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
Psycho II (Franklin, 1983)
Psycho III (Perkins, 1986)
Psycho IV: The Beginning (Garris, 1990)
Psycho (Van Sant, 1998)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: horror, needless sequels, slashers, summer of blood, thrillers
