1983 @ 40: PSYCHO II

After a black and white Universal logo animation and a replay of the shower scene from the original, we leap forward twenty or so years to a law court to witness the liberation of Norman Bates after decades in psychiatric care. This is not a joyous occasion for all. Vera Miles, from the original film, as the sister of the victim in the shower scene, goes all bammy, trying to overturn the decision. Norman gets driven back to the old motel which has become an off road oasis of sin under the management of the sleazy Toomey. Norman, known for his worst days locally, takes up a rehabilitation job at a local diner. There he meets and connects with Mary, the harassed young waiter. Mary's boyfriend dumps her and Norman offers her a room at his place. He has heaps of them, after all. She's understandably hesitant to take him up but her situation is bad. What could go wrong?

Making a sequel to an icon is a tough one. Do you just remake it with lots of goofy callbacks and updates or do you go harder and extend what you have? It's to the great credit to Psycho II's team that they chose the latter. The tortured Norman Bates so twisted by possession in the original has emerged through decades of care. He's edgy in the outside world and it takes him time to get into the swing and there's always the possibility that he'll just fall back into the same vortex of madness. That's the notion they went with and added a solid blurring of reality and fugue states to produce something not just new but felt necessary.

The sample scene from the original at the opening of this one is poignant here. It's both an acknowledgement and point of departure. There's no point in pretending that you're not treading on cinematically sacred ground because that's always going to be there. And this was 1983 when a rapidly popular home video market was making available a cosmos of retrograde cinema to audiences who didn't make it to the rep cinemas. By the time Psycho II came out the shower scene was long warped through pauses and replays on VHS tapes the world over. This chance to see it on a big screen before the next chapter was more than a "previously on..." moment, it was an invitation to more of Bates Motel.

It was blessed with fine casting, too, starting with the director. Australian Richard Franklin had already wowed with his Hitchcockian Patrick and Road Games thrillers and was a natural (Hitch-clone Brian de Palma had wisely demurred, it probably being a little too close to home). Franklin barnstorms the new material, keeping the ugly conspiracy plot close to the hazards it's meant to engender. 

Anthony Perkins returns as Norman but an older and more weathered man than the high strung bundle of nerves he was in the 1960 characterisation. His pathos is palpable and compels us to grind our teeth wanting his to get through and win against his new torments. Meg Tilly whose spacey presence had already illuminated screens in The Big Chill and would again in Agnes of God, brings an effortless vulnerability to Mary adding credibility to her difficult role. Vera Miles as Lila is all lifelong bitterness and shriek but that is serving the script she's given. Robert Loggia adds a gangster toughness to his Dr Raymond, wiping the table of the still tawdry cliches of psychiatrist characters (especially after Donald Pleasance had gleefully resurrected them in Halloween).

I avoided this film at the time, being a film student (on the theoretical rather than practical side) as I thought the original "text" was best left untampered or modified with '80s explicit screen gore. A fellow student argued much more wisely that Hitchcock would have got up from his laurel couch and done all the tampering and bloody violence that the culture would allow (at a time when the slasher sub-genre was only gathering strength). Yes, of course, he would have. Yes, he created all manner of invention as he circumvented the censors of his heyday but he was absolutely never above the call of popular cinema. Also, I don't know why the gouge-eyed corpse in The Birds didn't occur to me, it's still pretty strong. And after that I just never got around to it. Then the anniversary came up. 

Psycho II was a sequel that worked to be its own film while clearly in tribute to the greatness of its original when slasher sequels were almost to the last just more of the same with an advanced number in the title. It's odd to think of the concept of restraint here as Psycho II is intended to carry on the work of Psycho but restraint it is that in answering the question "what happened then?" it didn't say "what do you think?" but "it's complicated".