Summer of Blood: Norman is an island
There should never have been any sequels to the 1960 film Psycho, of course. It is not at all a perfect film (that godawful psychiatrist scene at the end is more than sufficient to guarantee that), but it is a fully-realized film, and one whose profound impact of the movie landscape is maybe literally impossible to overstate. So it's a downright goddamn miracle that the sequel-happy '80s produced two actually satisfying sequels to that one-of-a-kind monument of cinema, in the form of 1983's Psycho II and 1986's Psycho III. And the people at Universal holding the keys to the franchise apparently decided that they had done such a great job of tempting fate already, that it was time to really push and see how far into "that is a one-of-a-kind terrible idea, how dare you even daydream about it?" territory they could get. For the fourth Psycho film (ignoring the failed 1987 television pilot Bates Motel, which ignored the continuity of all the other sequels and didn't involve series star Anthony Perkins in any way), the company decided that the only thing smarter than an unnecessary sequel to Psycho was an unnecessary prequel to Psycho, and thus we arrive at 1990's Psycho IV: The Beginning.
And indeed, "unnecessary prequel" isn't giving it enough credit: it is both prequel and sequel, featuring present-day Norman Bates (Perkins) calling in to a radio show on the topic "Boys Who Kill Their Mothers", and offering his own recollection of the days almost a half-century prior, when he was a nervous, psychologically fragile teenager played by Henry Thomas, and his mother Norma (Olivia Hussey) was an abusive basket case who took enormous delight in confusing the boy's burgeoning sexuality and turning him into a real broken-down neurotic about his erotic urges. And of course, she ended up taking it too far, and one day after Norman saw her in bed with her loutish new paramour Chet Rudolph (Thomas Shuster), he just went a little mad, as we all do sometimes. Though we don't all poison our mothers and their boyfriends when that happens.
I have, of course, essentially just spoiled Psycho IV: The Beginning, since that poisoning happens some 75 minutes into the 96-minute film. But then, of course again, it came spoiled. It even spoils itself, since Norman tells the radio host, Fran Ambrose (CCH Pounder), and thus ourselves, right as he calls in, that he did this thing. This is the danger of the prequel as a form, making us wait to learn something we already know, and Psycho IV is practically bragging about how much it's not looking to surprise us on any level whatsoever. It's perhaps therefore the most miraculous thing of all that once again, it's pretty okay: the worst of the four, both for its storytelling shortcomings and its generally bland directing by the generally bland Mick Garris, who would go on to become best known for his Stephen King telefilms in the 1990s, the place you go for Stephen King adaptations that aren't going to bother you too much by such fussy thing as "being good". And Psycho IV is itself a telefilm, sort of: it was produced by Universal Television for the cable channel Showtime, which meant it could still have nudity and blood (it has both, though the nudity is certainly a bigger apparent priority), and then released theatrically outside of the United States. And the version you're most likely to find to watch these days is in the cropped widescreen aspect ratio assembled for that theatrical release. Luckily, Garris and cinematographer Rodney Charters weren't creating terribly interesting or complicated compositions, so they don't suffer from being reframed.
Cattiness aside, Psycho IV: The Beginning is still better than I'd have expected the best sequel to Psycho might end up before starting this journey, let alone the worst. For the first time in any of the sequels, the relative quality it rises up to - and while I've given it 2.5 stars, that 2.5 stars is in the context of a made-for-cable slasher film in 1990 that was a completely pointless prequel to an all-time masterpiece, so the film is seriously punching above its weight class - has very little to do with Anthony Perkins, who gets not much to do until the film's final third, and is stuck in a very tedious framework narrative for the rest of it. But it does happen in large part thanks to the acting: Thomas and Hussey are both pretty terrific, managing to overcome my initial misgivings in both their cases to provide a pair of rather marvelous performances of co-dependent psychopaths.
And they're not easy tasks the actors have been given. Thomas has to put forth an impression of Young Anthony Perkins in a film where Perkins also appears; it would be easy to imagine that descending into pure mimicry, but he's always tweaking his version of Norman just slightly, to distinguish this version of the character who isn't sharing his skull with the insistent personality of "Mother" from the lanky, resentful boy who swallows up the resentment (and all of his other feelings) while appearing to physically retreat into his body. He captures all of Perkins's distinct vocal rhythms (which becomes most obvious in the beats where the screenplay directly lifts from the original film), but makes it his own, playing a nervous, insular, guilt-stricken Norman who feels very much like he could grow into the skittish adult of the 1960 film, though not exactly the gruff old man Perkins is playing here.
Hussey's performance is much bigger, and for a time I wondered if I slightly hated it. She's speaking in a very arch, sharp way, with an accent that's midway between her own native English accent and the ever so vaguely Southern Gothic tones Virginia Gregg used in the earlier films, and the one thing it doesn't sound like is a woman with any business living in a small California town in the 1940s. But eventually it clicks, or maybe I figured out what Hussey was up to. She's playing Norma as basically a different manifestation of Norman's badly-maintained simulation of humanity in 1960: all surfaces, a crude performance of stable humanity as carried out by a person who has no actual understanding of what "stability" looks like. Her take on Norma is above all things theatrical and mask-like; even her bursts of rage feel like she's trying to channel something much darker into "mere" anger. It's a weird grotesquerie of a performance, but it sort of has to be, especially if we keep in mind that the movie is, ultimately, depicting Norman's own memory of these events.
At any rate, when the film is just about watching Hussey flail out at Thomas, and Thomas grow ever more wound-up and tight as he takes it, Psycho IV is pretty interesting as a movie in and of itself, if not necessarily as a continuation of this series. And it is very often just about that. I can't swear that anything else really works for me, though. Joseph Stefano's screenplay - the screenwriter of the 1960 Psycho coming back to put his monster to bed - manhandles the structure of Norman's recollections to make sure the death of Norma comes as the climax to the flashbacks, so things are told out of order, and it feels complicated for no purpose; getting one of his later kills as "Mother" in nice and early burnishes the film's credentials as a late slasher film, but it's hardly necessary, and there's nothing of inherent interest in the scene, either. The radio show framework is a complete misfire: Pounder is a great character actor and she keeps the mood low and tense, but these scenes don't do anything. And Stefano's decision to bring back a version of the psychiatrist character from the end of the first movie as a guest on her show, to serve as the Dr. Loomis figure, ranting about how they're not taking Norman's potential for danger seriously enough, feels like it's just demanding some pushback from Fate. That's true even with Warren Frost, no slouch of a character actor himself, providing the right amount of professional dignity as he rants. The fact that Dr. Richmond just basically stands up and walks out of the film at a certain point doesn't help give any more impression that he's got a real function to serve here.
For that matter, the radio show itself doesn't really serve any purpose: Norman mentions early on that he might kill somebody new very soon, and this causes Fran and her staff to go on high "keep him on the phone, talking!" alert, but there's absolutely no feeling of urgency around this; when it finally becomes the actual plot of the movie, with less than a half-hour to go, his murderous instinct feels like it has been carted in from a different film focused on different goals. It's nice, I guess, that the same final half-hour finally provides Perkins with something to do besides speak very grimly and with a defeated attitude into a phone, but it's basically just turning him fully and completely into a standard-issue mad slasher, with none of the nervousness and sensitivity of his earlier takes on the character - or Thomas's take on the character in this same movie.
But for Psycho IV: The Beginning to have some third-act problems and a rough structure is already conceding the film's victory. This should be complete garbage; instead, it is not a very good movie. But it's still sort of interesting and mostly worth watching, and that is a remarkable triumph for a movie like this. It's not anything like a resounding send-off to a series whose existence makes no sense; but it manages to button things up in a pretty satisfying way, and make me willing to say something I would have earnestly considered a complete impossibility not very long ago: the Psycho series is pretty good, and I'm glad they made it.
Body Count: 4, the lowest in the series since the first movie; even at such a tiny number, two of them feel like obvious body-count-inflating padding.
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!
And indeed, "unnecessary prequel" isn't giving it enough credit: it is both prequel and sequel, featuring present-day Norman Bates (Perkins) calling in to a radio show on the topic "Boys Who Kill Their Mothers", and offering his own recollection of the days almost a half-century prior, when he was a nervous, psychologically fragile teenager played by Henry Thomas, and his mother Norma (Olivia Hussey) was an abusive basket case who took enormous delight in confusing the boy's burgeoning sexuality and turning him into a real broken-down neurotic about his erotic urges. And of course, she ended up taking it too far, and one day after Norman saw her in bed with her loutish new paramour Chet Rudolph (Thomas Shuster), he just went a little mad, as we all do sometimes. Though we don't all poison our mothers and their boyfriends when that happens.
I have, of course, essentially just spoiled Psycho IV: The Beginning, since that poisoning happens some 75 minutes into the 96-minute film. But then, of course again, it came spoiled. It even spoils itself, since Norman tells the radio host, Fran Ambrose (CCH Pounder), and thus ourselves, right as he calls in, that he did this thing. This is the danger of the prequel as a form, making us wait to learn something we already know, and Psycho IV is practically bragging about how much it's not looking to surprise us on any level whatsoever. It's perhaps therefore the most miraculous thing of all that once again, it's pretty okay: the worst of the four, both for its storytelling shortcomings and its generally bland directing by the generally bland Mick Garris, who would go on to become best known for his Stephen King telefilms in the 1990s, the place you go for Stephen King adaptations that aren't going to bother you too much by such fussy thing as "being good". And Psycho IV is itself a telefilm, sort of: it was produced by Universal Television for the cable channel Showtime, which meant it could still have nudity and blood (it has both, though the nudity is certainly a bigger apparent priority), and then released theatrically outside of the United States. And the version you're most likely to find to watch these days is in the cropped widescreen aspect ratio assembled for that theatrical release. Luckily, Garris and cinematographer Rodney Charters weren't creating terribly interesting or complicated compositions, so they don't suffer from being reframed.
Cattiness aside, Psycho IV: The Beginning is still better than I'd have expected the best sequel to Psycho might end up before starting this journey, let alone the worst. For the first time in any of the sequels, the relative quality it rises up to - and while I've given it 2.5 stars, that 2.5 stars is in the context of a made-for-cable slasher film in 1990 that was a completely pointless prequel to an all-time masterpiece, so the film is seriously punching above its weight class - has very little to do with Anthony Perkins, who gets not much to do until the film's final third, and is stuck in a very tedious framework narrative for the rest of it. But it does happen in large part thanks to the acting: Thomas and Hussey are both pretty terrific, managing to overcome my initial misgivings in both their cases to provide a pair of rather marvelous performances of co-dependent psychopaths.
And they're not easy tasks the actors have been given. Thomas has to put forth an impression of Young Anthony Perkins in a film where Perkins also appears; it would be easy to imagine that descending into pure mimicry, but he's always tweaking his version of Norman just slightly, to distinguish this version of the character who isn't sharing his skull with the insistent personality of "Mother" from the lanky, resentful boy who swallows up the resentment (and all of his other feelings) while appearing to physically retreat into his body. He captures all of Perkins's distinct vocal rhythms (which becomes most obvious in the beats where the screenplay directly lifts from the original film), but makes it his own, playing a nervous, insular, guilt-stricken Norman who feels very much like he could grow into the skittish adult of the 1960 film, though not exactly the gruff old man Perkins is playing here.
Hussey's performance is much bigger, and for a time I wondered if I slightly hated it. She's speaking in a very arch, sharp way, with an accent that's midway between her own native English accent and the ever so vaguely Southern Gothic tones Virginia Gregg used in the earlier films, and the one thing it doesn't sound like is a woman with any business living in a small California town in the 1940s. But eventually it clicks, or maybe I figured out what Hussey was up to. She's playing Norma as basically a different manifestation of Norman's badly-maintained simulation of humanity in 1960: all surfaces, a crude performance of stable humanity as carried out by a person who has no actual understanding of what "stability" looks like. Her take on Norma is above all things theatrical and mask-like; even her bursts of rage feel like she's trying to channel something much darker into "mere" anger. It's a weird grotesquerie of a performance, but it sort of has to be, especially if we keep in mind that the movie is, ultimately, depicting Norman's own memory of these events.
At any rate, when the film is just about watching Hussey flail out at Thomas, and Thomas grow ever more wound-up and tight as he takes it, Psycho IV is pretty interesting as a movie in and of itself, if not necessarily as a continuation of this series. And it is very often just about that. I can't swear that anything else really works for me, though. Joseph Stefano's screenplay - the screenwriter of the 1960 Psycho coming back to put his monster to bed - manhandles the structure of Norman's recollections to make sure the death of Norma comes as the climax to the flashbacks, so things are told out of order, and it feels complicated for no purpose; getting one of his later kills as "Mother" in nice and early burnishes the film's credentials as a late slasher film, but it's hardly necessary, and there's nothing of inherent interest in the scene, either. The radio show framework is a complete misfire: Pounder is a great character actor and she keeps the mood low and tense, but these scenes don't do anything. And Stefano's decision to bring back a version of the psychiatrist character from the end of the first movie as a guest on her show, to serve as the Dr. Loomis figure, ranting about how they're not taking Norman's potential for danger seriously enough, feels like it's just demanding some pushback from Fate. That's true even with Warren Frost, no slouch of a character actor himself, providing the right amount of professional dignity as he rants. The fact that Dr. Richmond just basically stands up and walks out of the film at a certain point doesn't help give any more impression that he's got a real function to serve here.
For that matter, the radio show itself doesn't really serve any purpose: Norman mentions early on that he might kill somebody new very soon, and this causes Fran and her staff to go on high "keep him on the phone, talking!" alert, but there's absolutely no feeling of urgency around this; when it finally becomes the actual plot of the movie, with less than a half-hour to go, his murderous instinct feels like it has been carted in from a different film focused on different goals. It's nice, I guess, that the same final half-hour finally provides Perkins with something to do besides speak very grimly and with a defeated attitude into a phone, but it's basically just turning him fully and completely into a standard-issue mad slasher, with none of the nervousness and sensitivity of his earlier takes on the character - or Thomas's take on the character in this same movie.
But for Psycho IV: The Beginning to have some third-act problems and a rough structure is already conceding the film's victory. This should be complete garbage; instead, it is not a very good movie. But it's still sort of interesting and mostly worth watching, and that is a remarkable triumph for a movie like this. It's not anything like a resounding send-off to a series whose existence makes no sense; but it manages to button things up in a pretty satisfying way, and make me willing to say something I would have earnestly considered a complete impossibility not very long ago: the Psycho series is pretty good, and I'm glad they made it.
Body Count: 4, the lowest in the series since the first movie; even at such a tiny number, two of them feel like obvious body-count-inflating padding.
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 prequels, needless sequels, slashers, summer of blood
