"Psycho IV" (1990) - The Sad Fate of Anthony Perkins

In 1990, Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates for the final time. Twice, actually.

PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING, is a step-up from NBC's BATES MOTEL. Made by Showtime, the film had the freedom to include the graphic violence and gratuitous nudity people plunked down their hard-earned cash to see. Would they paid to have see this as a theatrical release like PSYCHO II or III? Probably not.

The movie is directed by Stephen King's favourite director; Mick Garris, who helmed SLEEPWALKERS and countless awful TV adaptations of King's work.

Anthony Perkins was interested in directing, and pitched a story idea he created in collaboration with Charles Pogue, the writer of PSYCHO III, but Universal chose to go with a script by Joseph Stefano, the original screenwriter of Hitchcock's PSYCHO.

Well, you can hardly fault them for that decision. Seems like a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, Stefano didn't have any interesting ideas about where to take Norman or the series. Instead, he succumbs to the creative bankruptcy that afflicts far too many once great story-tellers; the old let's do a prequel shuffle.

There are few things more boring than watching tepid re-enactments of backstory you already know. Yes, Norman had a bad relationship with his mother. Yes, he poisoned her and her lover. Yes, he stole her body and put his taxidermy skills to use to preserve her. The only reason for dramatizing all this stuff thirty years later is because the filmmakers were too lazy to come up with their own ideas.

The details of what went on between Norman and his mother are sprinkled throughout Hitchcock's PSYCHO. Only at the end do we have the full the picture. It lingers in our mind like a ghost story, or a nightmare. When you think about young Norman poisoning his mother, or robbing her grave, your imagination makes these images more creepy and disturbing than anything that appears on screen.

I think the makers of PSYCHO II understood this, because rather than have a full-fledged flashback depicting Norman poisoning his mother, the movie is restrained. We see the reflection of a young boy in a doorknob, hear the gasps of an angry, dying woman. They show just enough to keep the horror thriving in our imagination.

After the wonderfully cinematic PSYCHO III, it's a huge letdown to see how small PSYCHO IV feels.  It was crafted for television, not the cinema.

There's one of those radio talk shows that used to exist back in the 80s, that got millions of listens across the country. Tonight's show is about boys who murder their mother, and wouldn't you know it, Norman Bates just happens to be listening, so he phones in to tell the story of his youth.

For most of the movie, Anthony Perkins is basically doing a cameo. He sits on the phone, leading us into lengthy flash-back scenes where Norman is played by Henry Thomas, who only eight years prior was Elliot in ET.

Mrs. Bates is played by Olivia Hussey, best known for her role in 1968's ROMEO AND JULIET. This is the version with the lengthy bedroom scene of underage nudity. Everyone I know had to watch this movie in high school, and more than one person has shared the same awkward story, about how the creepy teacher "just happened" to pause the movie for discussion on a shot of Romeo's ass, or the quick flash of Juliet's tits. It's like they'd been waiting all year for the day they got to show the kids this movie. See, back before Columbine, high school was a lot more lax.

Joseph Stefano writes in callbacks to the original movie that don't make any sense. Like, when Mr. Cassidy asks Marion if she's unhappy, she replies "Not inordinately." So throughout PSYCHO IV, we hear Norman repeating the same line.

It's such a random line to bring back. And doesn't even make sense, since Norman wasn't the one using it in the original movie. It's like if in THE PHANTOM MENACE, Mace Windu kept mentioning he needed to go to Toshi's to pick up some power converters.

Another bothersome thing about PSYCHO IV is I have no idea where it takes place in relation to the other sequels. At first, you get the impression it's ignoring Parts II and III, and is just supposed to be a direct sequel to the original, but Norman mentions his last murders were four years ago. Is he referring to the events of PSYCHO III?

Stefano can't even keep the details from his original script in check. Norman says the peephole in the parlour was made by his father. But in the original movie, his father is dead long before the hotel is built. They don't build the hotel until mother shacks up with her new boyfriend.

During the making of PSYCHO IV, Anthony Perkins was diagnosed with HIV. Two years later, he passed away on September 12th 1992.

His beloved wife, actress Berry Berenson, died one day shy of the ninth anniversary of Perkins passing. Perkins wife died on September 11th 2001, as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Centre.

To end on a positive note, I could point out Perkins' played Norman Bates one more time in 1990, the same year as PSYCHO IV.

Oddly enough, Perkins' appeared as Norman in a commercial for Oatmeal Crisp cereal.

I think this speaks to how popular the character of Norman Bates was in the public mind, that the good people at General Mills chose to have a vicious serial killer as the spokesperson for their product. Not a fantasy character like Dracula or Frankenstein, but a human, based of the real-life murderer Ed Gein. I can just imagine the pitch meeting in the big boardroom. "Hey, Norman Bates, the guy best known for hacking naked women to death with a butcher knife, that's the who we ought to get to tell people our cereal tastes good!"

"Bates Motel" TV Pilot (1987)

Although PSYCHO III has aged well, and now stands out as one of the more interesting and stylish horror films of the 80's, back in the day it's meagre box-office returns were a major disappointment.

Roger Ebert tried to help spread some good word, but his positive review was torpedo by old Baldy McSourpuss.

The message from Universal was clear: PSYCHO III had disgraced the franchise, and there would be no more feature films.

The facade of the PSYCHO house was a major attraction at the Universal Studio tour. I'm pretty sure one day an executive looked at it and said, "Well jeez, we have the house on the backlot. We might as well make a TV show with it."

So in the summer of 1987,  NBC aired the pilot of a proposed television series based on PSYCHO, called BATES MOTEL, a title so good, twenty-five years later A&E would use it for their new series.

From the very beginning, it obvious BATES MOTEL isn't attempting to re-create the atmosphere of the films. Just listen to its opening theme. This is your PSYCHO TV series? It sounds like the background music they play on Oprah when some woman's talking about her dumb kid who overcame an eating disorder or something.

It seems Universal didn't want Anthony Perkins anywhere near this production. One of the first things they do is kill off Norman. In the flashbacks, he's played by a different actor. 

The TV show centres on a new character, this kid Alex, who comes from a very sad background. After his mother dies, he's left in the care of an abusive stepfather, who constantly beats him, until one day he fights back and kills his stepfather.

Seems kind of extreme that would get little Alex thrown into a mental hospital for the criminally insane, but that's not even the weird part. The doctor decides the best course of therapy is for little Alex to become friends with Norman Bates.

Yeah, let's take this fragile child and make him become best buddies with the sex maniac who's committed multiple vicious murders. Aw, isn't that cute, look at the two of them together. I know Norman mostly killed women he was sexually attracted to, but seeing him frolic with a little boy makes me uncomfortable.

When Norman dies, he leaves the Bates Motel to Alex. Once Alex gets his walking papers, he decides to run the motel. His way of keeping Norman's spirit alive.

Carrying an urn full of Norman's cremated ashes, Alex inspects the abandoned motel. There's an interesting moment when he looks at the ledger, and you can see where Marion Crane signed in as Marie Samuels. Nice call-back to PSYCHO.

But the ledger in-joke goes further.

In the original PSYCHO, the previous guest to sign in before Marion was one Michael Scott of San Fransisco. How about that, Michael Scott stayed at the Bates Motel.

Now in the TV show, the name is now Mildred Scott of San Fransisco. Weird they would decide to change the name from Michael to Mildred. They didn't have to include the ledger at all. It isn't some important piece of exposition. Why go through the trouble of copying all the unimportant details of Michael Scott's sign in, and then change his first name?

I'd say either it's some kind of joke, like the prop person who made the ledger had a mother-in-law named Mildred, or, they couldn't read the writing in the original movie and misread the name of Michael as Mildred. Remember, this is back in 1987 where you couldn't get HD screen shots with the snap of a finger.

Another interesting detail about the ledger is the date. July 1960. In PSYCHO, Marion Crane arrived at the Bates Motel in December, not July.

As most fans of PSYCHO know, the decision to have the movie take place in December was on account of the footage shot for the rear-projection scenes of Marion driving. When this footage was filmed, the street poles still had Christmas decorations on them. Wanting to keep the budget as low as possible, Hitchcock figured it would be easier to insert a title card with the date December 11th at the beginning of the movie than it would be to reshoot all that driving footage.

After BATES MOTEL prompted me to compare the two ledgers, I noticed something I'd never seen before.

This Michael Scott character signed in to the motel on April 18th. Most likely, this sequence was shot before the Christmas decoration problem was noticed in the driving footage, so that would suggest this is the time period PSYCHO was originally conceived of taking place during; not December, but late April or early May.

Since Alex comes off as a weirdo (I mean, until yesterday he's been in the nuthouse his whole life) the producers were probably worried audiences would think he was gay or asexual, so they shoehorn in a love interest--TANK GIRL wearing a chicken suit.

During construction of the new motel, a worker is electrocuted, leading to the discovery of a body buried in the ground. It's Norman's mother.

Huh?

What the hell is she doing buried down there? Did the makers of this not watch the original movie? Surely they're not suggesting that after Sam subdued Norman and unmasked him as the killer, that the police grabbed her old bag of bones from out of the fruit cellar and buried her on the grounds of the motel? 

I can understand them ignoring PSYCHO II and III, but if you're going to ignore the continuity set down in the ORIGINAL FILM, why even bother to make the show?

They end up stealing the plot from PSYCHO II, where Lila Loomis was pretending to be mother in order to drive Norman crazy. In BATES MOTEL, a greedy bank manager dresses up like mother in order to scare Alex away so he can buy the valuable property.

This pilot is actually two shows in one, as I guess they weren't 100% certain what the format of the show was going to be. The first half is a show about Alex and the Chicken Lady living in the spooky old Bates House. The second half imagines BATES MOTEL as an anthology series, like THE TWILIGHT ZONE, where every week a new guest would check in and have some kind adventure.

A woman arrives and is about to slit her wrists in the tub… really? You know for a show that wants to pretend the PSYCHO sequels don't exist, they're sure taking a lot from them.

Anyway, she's about to kill herself, when some nosey party girl wanders into her room. All of her buddies have checked into the motel, and they're boogie-ing down in the cafe. The girl introduces suicide lady to a young Jason Bateman, and even though she's old enough to be his mother, soon they're about to get hot and heavy. Yowza.

However, it turns out all these young revelers are the ghosts of kids who committed suicide. Judging from their dress, I'd say back in the fifties. They're doomed to roam the earth, warning others not to kill themselves, lest they end up like them.

But I don't know, that kind of looks like a pretty good afterlife to me. They all get to pal around together, traveling the country, wild parties every night, maybe get some nookie from old MILFS... I can think of worse ways to spend eternity.

Of course, none of these people ever came back, as BATES MOTEL did not become a TV series. There was only one final kick at the cat. For that, they decided to bring back Norman.

And we'll warn you right now, it is not a happy ending.

"Psycho III" (1986) Norman ❤️ Suicidal Nun

PSYCHO III was directed by Anthony Perkins. I'm guessing that was his stipulation for returning to this franchise. You want me back as Norman? Then you give me the chance to direct.

The movie has a most unusual opening. A suicidal nun accidentally causes the death of one of her compadres. This scene bring to mind Hitchcock's VERTIGO, both with its clock tower and innocent person plunging to their death.

Obviously, it would be too awkward for her to remain in the convent. I bet every time the bells rung, everyone would be looking at her like, "Yeah, we remember what you did."

We see the rundown hotel. There are some subtle call-backs to PSYCHO II.  Abandoned in the dirt, we see the book Lila Loomis' daughter was reading. On the storm window, we see the marks left behind by the murdered horny kid. Wait, the murderer didn't clean those up when they disposed of the body before the police arrived?

The scene introducing us to Norman is great.  He poisons the bird feeder so he can collect sample for his "hobby". What a ghoul.

Now, it's obvious the camera pans away to Norman, so that the live birds can be switched out with fake dead ones by the time the camera pans back, but I wonder how they achieved the effect of the birds falling to the ground and flopping around. Can you really train a bird to do that? I think the animal wranglers pulled a Bill Cosby and drugged those birds.

There's a newspaper reporter digging up dirt on Norman. She starts with his previous place of employment.

The restaurant owner claims Norman was a great employee, but he only worked there a couple of days before quitting to run the motel. And during that time he broke plates, got into fights with customers, and burned the restaurant guy's arm. He's remembering Norman's work record with rose-coloured glasses.

The ex-nun meets some sleazy musician named Duke, and the both of them wind up moving into the motel. Norman immediately gives Duke a job, putting him in charge of the business. As for the Nun, Norman immediately begins watching her undress through the back parlour peephole. Don't the motel TV's have Skinemax or something Norman can watch to get his rocks off to? He's getting too old for this peeping through the wall nonsense.

I like that they've kept the same painting hanging over the peephole since the original movie.

The painting depicts the Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders. As it goes, Susanna was bathing alone in the lake when these two horny old guys came by. The elders threaten Susanna, saying they'll claim they saw her having sex with some guy, unless, of course, she has sex with them. Back in those days, promiscuous women were put to death. However, just before Susanna is executed, Daniel questions the elders and figures out they're full of shit, and they get executed instead of her.

In PSYCHO III, when Norman looks at the picture, he hallucinates, now seeing Susanna as enjoying the company of the elders. It's his twisted mind telling him, "She's a slut, she deserves to die."

But the jokes on him! After he dresses up like Mother and prepares to stab her, it turns out she's already slit her own wrists.

For the second time, the Nun fails at her own suicide.

Perhaps frustrated he didn't get to kill her, Norman stabs some bar girl Duke brought back to the motel. Clearly, this scene is supposed to mirror the shower murder, having the victim trapped in a confined space. They even repeat Norman's "Oh God, Mother! Blood! Blood!" dialogue. 

Now before she was murdered, Duke gave the girl a five dollar bill with a missing corner. The next day, he knows something is up when he finds that same bill in the cash register.

This feels really off that Norman would take the five dollars. She had it tucked into the waistband of her underwear. You mean he patted her down looking for cash? That isn't his MO at all.

The movie spends a lot of time throwing romance our way, as Norman and the Nun get friendly. It's kind of sweet, seeing two damaged people make a connection. Instead of rooting for her to get the hell away from Norman, you're pulling for him to get his shit together.

And stop doing stuff like this. Jeez, poor woman is just trying to take a dump, and the next thing you know she's the most brutal murder in the movie.

The filmmakers clearly want you to feel bad for her. They shoehorn in some random scene of her telling the Nun to keep her door closed. I guess that's supposed to be enough to make me think she's a wonderful, full-fledged character, so I'll feel bad when she gets killed. But I'll be honest, it has no where near the same effect as the murder of a character you've been sympathizing and rooting for for over twenty minutes.  

This is likely the best scene in the movie, where the Sheriff, there to investigate the disappearance of the toilet lady, eats bloody ice cubes out of the chest where her body is hidden. It's such a great gag. Suspenseful, darkly humorous. It reminds me a bit of that episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where the woman murders her husband by beating him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb, and then cooks and serves the lamb to the officers investigating his murder, tricking them into eating the murder weapon. No doubt, Hitchcock would loved to have had this ice chest scene in one of his movies.

Perkins really did a fantastic job directing PSYCHO III. The photography is elegant, the atmosphere is rich, both the barren desert landscape and the seedy neon-lit hotel rooms. It's a shame he didn't direct more movies, as PSYCHO III demonstrates his ability to craft wonderful cinematic moments.

Of course, the movie ends tragically, with the Nun being killed when Norman accidentally knocks her down the stairs. I guess it's supposed to be punishment, for her accidentally knocking that old Nun off the tower at the beginning of the movie. I suppose Alanis Morrissette would call this ironic. Don't you think?

Just as PSYCHO II ret-conned PSYCHO I, PSYCHO III decides to ret-con PSYCHO II, by getting rid of Missuss Spool being Norman's real mother. They weren't clever about it or anything. They just had the reporter tell Norman, "Yeah, she was crazy. She made all that shit about being your Mother up."

The final shot of the movie is interesting. As Norman is being hauled away to the mental hospital, most-likely for good this time, Perkins' films the scene using an obvious, out-dated rear-projection. It looks nothing like the other driving scenes in the movie, which as far as I can tell were shot with car rigs on real roads. My guess is Perkins wanted to honour the sort of technology Hitchcock used decades earlier, and for the last image of his film to look like it belonged in that era.

Released in the summer of 1986, PSYCHO III didn't do as well at the box office as PSYCHO II, grossing only 14 million. So it made more money than BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (11 million), but not as much as HOWARD THE DUCK (16 million).

For better or worse, this was the end of the Anthony Perkins PSYCHO franchise.

At least, on the big screen.

"Psycho III" plays at the Can-View Drive-In in June of 1986