Psycho II, or, Repro Bates

The most startling thing about Psycho II is that it’s not completely terrible.

I actually don’t remember when I first saw Psycho; 1983 (when Psycho II was released) seems a little young for me, but it’s not entirely out of the question. But I do remember that I had less than no interest in the sequels. Even before my cinema snob tendencies kicked in, it seemed like a very bad idea to try and carry on from a classic. Once they did kick in, I’m sure I made analogies to trying to dig up Hitchcock’s corpse and keep it in the fruit cellar.

The sequel starts with the old-school Universal logo1, followed by the shower scene from the original movie. (You might have heard of it). The thing that immediately jumped out at me was that it was an abridged version. The most memorable shots were all there, but it was edited way down, showing enough to remind audiences of what happened, without giving the full impact of how it felt so violent and seemed to go on for so long because of all of the jarring cuts (pun intended).

Except here’s the thing: it wasn’t, actually. I just compared it to the original 2 and they’re about the same. The only difference is the long shot of water in the drain and the slow pull back from Marion’s eye. Which all gave me an even greater appreciation for how good the original is, because the scene is actually kind of unremarkable now when it’s taken out of context. In my memory of it, everything that makes it so impactful is contained in the scene itself; in reality, it’s the result of being perfectly placed at the turning point of a long, slow, carefully-controlled boil of intrigue and tension.

Not used as a cold open, and not transitioning into color and set to a Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack. I don’t mean any disrespect to his work, but few things feel more like getting a cold plunge directly into a movie from the early 80s than hearing his music.

I didn’t know what to make of the opening, and I’m still not completely sure. Surely even teen audiences in 1983 would’ve been familiar enough with one of the most famous horror movies ever made that they didn’t need to be reminded of its most famous scene? And on the off chance you weren’t, then the scene doesn’t make much sense out of context. Especially the shot focusing on a rolled-up newspaper on a nightstand. I was left thinking that it just had to be an homage. An acknowledgement that yes, they understood the hubris of making a sequel to a classic, and just bear with it.

That’s the only explanation that makes any sense to me, since most of Psycho II is so devoid of pretense — or if you’re less charitable, devoid of ambition — that it rarely feels like they even aspired to living up to the original. Instead, it seems like any other early 80s suspense thriller, with the same pacing, cinematography, dialogue, and music you’d expect. At times, it feels more like a TV movie, or an episode of Night Gallery, than a feature film.

Which was almost certainly the right choice, honestly. Any attempts to Art This Mother Up would’ve just drawn attention to how much this isn’t as skillful as the original. So it’s probably better to make it clear that they’re more interested in continuing the story than in living up to a classic.

There are several scenes that feel more experimental, but they’re all direct homages to scenes or moments from Psycho. The most famous scenes all get a reference, with a beautiful young woman in a shower, a surprising kill in the house, a car being pulled from the swamp, a swinging light in the fruit cellar, and even a couple of quiet sandwich-focused scenes. There are even a couple of dolly zoom shots, because why not throw some Vertigo in while we’re at it?

But it’s mostly a whodunnit suspense thriller, where the questions are Is someone trying to drive Norman Bates crazy? and Is it working? And again, the biggest surprise is how well that all works. It knows what your assumptions and suspicions are, and it keeps playing with them past the point that you’d think it’d stop being effective. You know what you’re supposed to think, but then that seems too obvious, but then does the movie even know that’s too obvious? Is it a fake-out, or is it a double fake-out, or am I supposed to suspect that it’s a double fake-out, and is a movie like this even clever enough to have that many levels of subterfuge?

And it’s fitting that since Psycho is remarkable for executing a rug-pull on the audience, bumping off the protagonist and making you scramble to find another sympathetic character to follow, Psycho II spends most of its runtime leaving you questioning who’s the good guy in this movie.

I don’t want to suggest that Psycho II is a brain-bending masterpiece; honestly, I think a lot of what kept me second-guessing was simply that it does read so much like a straightforward suspense thriller. It gets a ton of mileage out of just making Norman Bates the protagonist, and having Anthony Perkins know how to be sympathetic while still being unmistakably off. Not just awkward like in the first movie, but like someone just barely keeping it together, and always making you wonder whether he’s snapped.

There are also hints of self-awareness throughout, like he’s spent the past 20 years being defined by this character, and he’s embracing it as much as if he were signing autographs and posing for creepy pictures at a horror convention. I often felt like he was screwing with the audience as much as someone in the movie was screwing with him.

Vera Miles is making the most of it, too. I got the sense that she’d spent the previous couple of decades being most known for the movie in which she essentially had to play the straight man, and she was finally getting to have some fun with it.

For a lot of the movie, I had trouble figuring out why it was working at all. It’s got strong early-80s vibes, where it’s simultaneously prudish and also trying to get away with as much as it can. We get a shot of Meg Tilly coming out of the shower that seems to be saying — look how much we can show now!3 But there’s also a sex motel with drugs and kids who sneak into a murder house to smoke marijuana cigarettes and make love. Everybody still calls it “make love.”

And the kills are weirdly inert. Just distractingly stiff and fake, with a knife going into what was clearly a latex mask, a prop body part, or just a close-up of somebody’s clothing. You’d think that they would have gotten better at it simply due to repetition, but every time it was like a stage hand weakly poking a knife into one of those big Barbie Makeup Heads.

Also, people work on movie logic, the basis of a big part of the plot is just too implausible to make sense, and the climax is entirely a case of the movie wanting specific things to happen, no matter whether they’re motivated or believable.

But for everything corny or cheesy about Psycho II, there’s something else that I genuinely liked. Its twists never felt like the movie being two steps ahead of me, but more like, “You go on ahead, we’ll catch up in a bit.” It doesn’t drag out its shocking secrets for too much longer after you’ve figured them out, and even though I knew how it was going to end, I still thought it was well-executed and oddly satisfying.

If you accept at the start that you’re never going to be able to live up to one of the most famous classic horror movies, why not pay homage to it with a surprisingly solid 80s thriller with a few genuinely clever ideas?

1
As with the Ouija sequel, and most of the Cabana Bay resort in Orlando for that matter, I genuinely love how much mileage Universal gets out of re-using its old logos to generate nostalgia for the studio itself

2
Assuming the Movieclips channel isn’t trying to gaslight me, and why would they? Isn’t that right, Mother?

3
I remembered Dennis Franz getting attention in the early 90s for baring his butt on NYPD Blue, and I wondered whether they were going to give him a shower scene here, too.

1 As with the Ouija sequel, and most of the Cabana Bay resort in Orlando for that matter, I genuinely love how much mileage Universal gets out of re-using its old logos to generate nostalgia for the studio itself

2 Assuming the Movieclips channel isn’t trying to gaslight me, and why would they? Isn’t that right, Mother?

3 I remembered Dennis Franz getting attention in the early 90s for baring his butt on NYPD Blue, and I wondered whether they were going to give him a shower scene here, too.