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!"
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