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.
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