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The Psycho Sequel Murders: How Do They Stack Up to the Originals?

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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SPOILERS for Psycho, Psycho II, Psycho III, and Psycho IV:

I'm one of those who thinks the Psycho sequels should not have been made. Unlike sequels of the quality of Godfather II or Aliens, or even Jurassic Park: The Lost World, these sequels were cheapjack, B from an A studio insults to what Hitchcock had done. I'm only glad that they delivered some good final paychecks to Tony Perkins before his death at 60 in 1992(one of those checks was for directing.)

Still, they exist, and in different ways, they had a FEW strengths. Psycho II was actually a hit in 1983 and showed that Hitchcock was still relevant after his death(it is also a little showcase for Vera Miles late in her career, and the "Lila story" is food for thought). Psycho III didn't do as well, but for my money, its the best of the bunch, the most intelligent(and intelligently directed by Perkins) and the most connected to the themes of the original film. Psycho IV was a cheapie that only played on cable in America, but it was the only sequel to use the Herrmann score from the original and to hence seem CONNECTED to the original. (It also gave us "The Psychiatrist Scene: The Movie" in filming that shrink's monologue in flashback.)

But if one REALLY thinks about the sequels, the biggest problem with them is hiding in plain sight:

The murders don't come close to the iconic power of the two in Hitchcock's film.

Hitchcock's Psycho(which I will NOT call "Psycho I") has a great screenplay, great camera movements, great montage editing, great acting(by Perkins, Leigh and Balsam above all) and great themes, but when you get right down to it, the history was made by the murders.

And yes, the shower scene is the historic one, the one that everybody knows and still talks about(a naked woman in a shower makes for a setting of erotic entrapment), but the staircase murder makes its own history(the BOO! jump shock; a face getting slashed.)

The Psycho murders made history as the FIRST shock murders in movies; but they have reason to stand as the BEST shock murders in movies. Hitchcock famously spent 7 days shooting the shower scene, and a team of editors spent weeks cutting it. Crew members tell us that the staircase murder was far harder to film than the shower murder, because of the camera movement problems on the stairs, the high angle on the first attack, and the choreography of the killer's moves.

The original murders were so meaningful, in complimentary ways. A woman gets killed. A man gets killed. Mother comes down to the motel to kill Marion; Arbogast comes up to the house to get murdered by mother.

The murders were meaningful in seminal, template-setting ways: The woman is killed for her alluring sex appeal; the man is killed for snooping around and getting too close to secrets that must never be learned.

And the murders were, perhaps above all, cinematic -- and "fantastical."

On paper, Psycho is about two murders that take place at a motel and adjacent house, and thus the story is founded in "banal plausibility."

But each of those murders "takes flight" into a special cinematic space that has NOTHING to do with plausibility: Marion expires in a flurry of quick-cut editing, screeching music and knife sound effects. Arbogast dies as shown from high, high above and then taking a staircase fall that WE take with him -- its not so much fake as impressionistic, a dream fall.

Herrmann's screeching violins make each murder one you have to scream at(especially the second one, with the music faster and more explosive).

Each murder depends on a lot of build-up before the killing begins: Marion's long, erotic shower before Mother enters the bathroom and pulls open the curtain; Arbogast's long walk up the hill to the house, and long walk up the stairs, before he is attacked. Suspense incarnate -- with some surprise.

The shower murder in particular "ends in art" with the long spinning dissolve from the blood down the drain to Marion's dead eye -- NO maker of traditional slasher movies has ever spent so much time on the "aftermath of murder." But Arbogast's murder ends with the most brutal reality in the picture: a victim on the floor, pinned down by a killer who is(incredibly) an old woman.

Yep, those two murders were powerful stuff. And they made Hitchcock multi-millions.

...which brings me to the sequel murders.

I'll try to pick a "best one" in each sequel, and then the best one from all the sequels-- one that comes closest to what Hitchcock did, if only to the Arbogast murder(the shower scene seems unassailable in film history.)

But I think even the "best one" in the Psycho sequels doesn't come close to the original two.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Here goes:

PSYCHO II:

One critic wrote that Psycho II "confronts its own eminent history head on" by opening with the shower scene. In some ways, it was vitally necessary to "link" the first sequel (22 years later!) to what was most famous and historic about the original. But this version of the original shower scene is rather truncated at the end, with the screeching violins sounding a bit too quiet and tinny. Biggest problem: this is just a woman dying in a shower, no sense of the woman, her story, the fame (in 1960) of the actress playing her. Still: you could say that Psycho II has the best murder of the sequels because it DOES have the shower scene.

But other murders come later, predictable in certain demoralizing ways.

Take the first one: of grimy motel manager Dennis Toomey(Dennis Franz.) Unlike the fairly neutral and sympathetic victims in the original, Toomey is a Bad Guy, who actually calls Norman "psycho" and challenges him to a fight in the diner where Norman tries to work after release from the asylum(with KNIVES?) I read the Psycho II script before I saw the movie, and on paper, Toomey was written like an idiot bully. Franz is a talented actor with a Chicago accented reality to him, and he's a lot better than the character on paper deserves.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Anyway, Toomey is one of those victims you WANT to die, and, after being fired by Norman as motel manager, Toomey is killed by "Mother"(now reduced to a creature like cipher, she could be ANYBODY) in the parlor where Norman and Marion had their talk. Its a quick affair, with Mother and her knife fragmented so that it is clear we can't tell who the killer is and we are meant to wonder. Toomey is slashed on the face roughly where Arbogast was slashed, but with the slash marks making deep crevices in the face(a make-up effect) rather than drawing blood. Fade out on Toomey's guttural moan. This murder is over before it begins and it is clear: nobody had the time to film this murder with any of the detail or care that Hitchocck brought.

Psycho II, murder II is pretty derivative stuff: a teenage boy and a teenage girl sneak into the fruit cellar to smoke pot and grope each other a bit. But Mother finds them. They run for the cellar window to escape to the land outside; the girl makes it -- but the boy does not. And mother stabs him in the back over and over(the close-ups look like a knife stabbing a soft pillow.)

This puts "Psycho II" soundly in what Roger Ebert called "dead teenager" territory(Halloween and Friday the 13th set the stage) and make Psycho II derivative of the wrong movie. The scene is pretty much a dead ringer for a similar scene(girl survives, boy dies) in the equally knock-offish Jaws II of 1978(which still cost more than Psycho II.) As a matter of plot, now the cops know there's been another murder in the Bates place, but their investigation sort of ends with no effort.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Psycho II murder 3 is a candidate for "best Psycho sequel murder": Lila Crane herself(VERA MILES herself) will be the victim, and thus film history is re-visited. Lila Crane is now Lila Loomis -- we learned that she married Sam but he died(of what? we don't know) and left her with a daughter(Meg Tilly.) In a stroke of irony that I think Hitchcock himself would have appreciated, Lila is killed (by "Mother" with a big butcher knife) in exactly the same fruit cellar where she escaped the same kind of death in 1960. It is as the decades and fate brought Lila right back to the same execution spot and delivered the goods this time.

Except: THIS fruit cellar in no way looks like the one in 1960 -- indeed it has a charcoal-fed stove in one corner and Lila will end up in the coals. AND: Lila is dispatched in the goriest murder in the entire Psycho series...and something feels wrong about that.

"Mother" approaches Lila, who is on her knees gathering up a wig, dress and knife she uses to "play Mrs. Bates." Lila turns.

We get an "ode to the shower scene' in that as Lila opens her mouth wide to scream, we get ONE..TWO..THREE ever closer shots of Lila's open mouth.

And then mother jams that big ol' knife blade right INTO that mouth, and on through the back of Lila's head.

The sudden shift from "HItchcockian edits" (the three ever closer shots of the victim's mouth) into "ultra-realistic gore"(knife through Lila's mouth and head) is like a jolt from stylish 1960 to gorehound 1983. The young uns' LOVED this murder, but if you liked the original...you felt kind of dirty.

The "knife through the mouth" effect was done in two ways: (1) a "fake Vera Miles head" was made to take in the knife into the mouth and (2) Vera Miles herself had to wear a "strap on" knife in her REAL mouth while she fell backwards to the floor making "choking and gurgling sounds." Distasteful. (And that the sequence had rather a sexual "deadly fellatio" aspect to it was....modern?)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The deaths come hot and heavy after Lila dies in Psycho III, but they are all rather contrived, silly almost: Meg Tilly(dressed up as Mother for therapeutic reasons), "accidentally" stabs psychiatrist Robert Loggia on the stairs; he falls off the stairs(not down them) and lands perfectly on the downstairs railing driving the knife up and into him(ala the scissors in Dial M, but much less realistically.)

And after an embarrassing showdown between Norman(now reduced to the drooling, whining maniac he NEVER played in the original), the cops come in and shoot Tilly. ANOTHER contrived death.

And we finally get Norman's sit down with a woman("Mrs. Spool") who says she's his REAL mother. This is up in the kitchen we only barely saw in Hitchcock's original; its got some murder mystery wrap-up exposition from Mrs. Spool (THIS mother killed everybody this time), its banal..and Norman's decision to bonk the woman over the head with a shovel is a very "un-Psycho" killing.

So knife murder-wise, Psycho II has three(Toomey, teenage boy, Lila) to Psycho's two, plus the original shower murder, plus the accidental stabbing of the shrink(the script called for this to be Simon Oakland's character from the original, by the way, how fitting that karma would have been; but Oakland was too old and ill to play the part.) Plus one cop shooting and one shovel bonking. Eh...too much.

Best killing(with reservations): Lila Loomis. In the fruit cellar, for old time's sake.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PSYCHO III murders:

Psycho III begins only weeks after Psycho II ended, but Norman inexplicably has a new, spiky-short haircut(courtesy of the ego of star-director Anthony Perkins, no doubt.)

The dead Mother("Mrs. Spool" a fan fiction character of no profundity) killed by Norman with a shovel, is up in her room and talking to Norman, but Psycho III still plays things a little coy: are the new knife murders being committed BY Norman...or yet by somebody else?

Psycho III opens with an ode to...Vertigo? As suicidal nun Diana Scarwid accidentally causes the death of an older nun who falls to her death from the top of a bell tower..inside rather than out. Scarwid hits the road and ends up at the now decrepit Bates Motel. A "drifter guitar musician" named Duke(Jeff Fahey) ends up at the motel, too, and becomes paid assistant manager of the dead business. He is established as a greasier version of Norman: all polite smiles and courtesy on first meeting, quickly revealed as a skirt-chaser(who insults and dumps his sexual conquests right after getting them), a cheat (he skims even the meager Bates Motel income) and dangerous.

We wait around to see who's gonna get killed first in Psycho III. And eventually, she appears: Duke's Fairvale pick-up, a hot number who does some nudity and sex with Duke in his Bates Motel cabin, and then gets thrown out by Duke onto the dirt outside the room. Where, ever so conveniently, there is a phone booth(OK in 1986..cells aren't widespread yet.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

"Mother" stabs this hot, slutty chick in the phone booth in scene which is at once an homage to the shower scene AND an homage to the phone booth bird attack on Tippi Hedren in The Birds AND which speaks to Mother's new coarseness(established in Psycho II) of hating "sluts and whores." Well, this female is certainly loose, and she pays the price. But it all seems too "on the nose" and, alas, Perkins didn't have seven days to film this murder...its like "the shower scene lite" in number of stab wounds and camera angles, but it is reminiscent ENOUGH of HItchocck to "pass." (And this: with no shower water to wash away the blood, it splatters all over the booth and on the victim's bare feet.)

Psycho III murder 2 is entirely arbitrary and based on Psycho author Robert Bloch once saying "I'm glad I staged that murder with the victim in the shower, rather than sitting on the toilet." Well, in Psycho III, she's sitting on the toilet. A toilet right off the parlor(Marion never saw THAT.)

The set-up is rather dopey and against the Psycho tradition: the shabby motel is host to a big party of middle-aged high school reunion folks gathered for "the big game" and so Norman is, for once, surrounded by customers. Silly scenes among those customers are staged. One of those customers -- a pretty woman who seems to be in her 30's(Katt Shea) makes her way to the parlor bathroom to pee and meets Mother there.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The one really GOOD thing about the "toilet murder" is...Katt Shea. Shea(sometimes known as Katt Shea Rubin before divorce) struggled in Hollywood and made a name for herself as a feminist director of sorts; back in 1986, she was simply a struggling actress. But I will say that Shea's personality and especially her line readings in this toilet murder scene are...great. ("Sorry, sister...this stall is,you know, "occupado.") i Shea had a great voice, a great attitude, real presence and it is indeed horrible to see Mother slash her throat and then stab her once in the stomach. Fine acting...lousy murder scene.

Psycho III onlyl clocks those two knife murders -- both of women -- before adding on some later killings of a non-Psycho nature.

First of all Norman -- AS Norman -- kills Duane Duke in an extended sequence which rather dilutes the "Psycho tradition" -- of MOTHER as the killer. Norman fights Duke, hits him over the head with a guitar(which hardly seems solid enough to kill anyone)..and then struggles in a car sinking into the swamp when Duke "comes back to life". The references to the "Psycho swamp" are good(Psycho III is FILLED with Psycho references), but the scene isn't really a Psycho murder scene. Duke drowns in the swamp; Norman escapes the death car and swims to shore(but not before meeting the phone booth victim under water).

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The final death in Psycho III is entirely accidental, as nun Maureen Coyle(MC...like Marion Crane) takes Norman's hand at the top of the Bates house stairs, and falls backwards down them upon being released by Norman, who lets go too quick. This one is "contrivance city" -- we have to believe that Maureen would fall because of Norman letting go, and at the bottom of the stairs she falls backward onto the arrow of the famous Cupid statue. Maureen gets "Arbogast's fall" down the stairs(ANOTHER reference to the original) but this time it IS so poorly staged that all we can see is bad process work and Scarwid not flailing as Balsam did -- Hitchcock's version comes out smelling like a rose.)

Indeed, as "Maureen's death" mirrors Arbogast's; so does Maureen the suicidal nun get a great re-do of the shower scene. She takes the shower, Mother enters to kill, but...Maureen is already "dying" from suicide razor wounds to her wrist. This "short circuits" murderous Mother and Norman rescues rather than kills Maureen.

Whereas Psycho II ended with Norman running the Bates Motel again, Psycho III ends with him headed back to the asylum again. He is proven the killer in Psycho III; all is restored(indeed, it turns out that Mrs. Spool wasn't his real mother, after all.)

The death toll in Psycho III: old nun falls in bell tower(accidental), young nun falls down stairs(accidental), crooked assistant motel manager bludgeoned and drowned by Norman and...two "old school" Psycho stabbing murders. Winner: the murder of the sexy young thing in the phone booth. Close enough to the shower killing, with a Birds phone booth additive. And the sexy young thing IS a sexy young thing. She does the nudity that Janet Leigh could not do.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING

One of the reasons I have always supported the psychiatrist scene in the original Psycho is that I felt the shrink gave us vital information unavailable anywhere else in the film : (1) Norman murdered his mother and her lover; (2) Norman gutted and stuffed his mother using taxidermy techniques AND (3) Norman killed two other "young girls" before Marion.

This last point was important because it told us: Norman's killing of Marion (in his Mother personality) was not a "one time only thing." He had done this before. Twice.

We could surmise that the other two female deaths(over a period of roughly 10 years) were the other two pretty young woman unfortunate enough to stay at the empty Bates Motel like Marion did.

But Psycho IV: The Beginning tells us: no. These two young women died for other reasons. Its "fan fiction" -- and in certain ways, its BAD fan fiction.

Psycho IV: The Beginning cuts back and forth from a present day Norman(Anthony Perkins, finally looking old and only two years from death in real life) flashbacking in a radio interview to his childhood and youth. There are no murders in the "present day" story. We only get the four famous murders alluded to in the original (1) Mother(by strychnine); (2) Mother's boyfriend(by strychnine) (3) a teenage tart out to take Norman's virginity and (4) a 30-something floozy out to give Norman a ('paid for?) good time.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

"By default," the murder of the teenage tart is the only "old school" murder in Psycho IV. Young teenage Norman(Henry Thomas, grown considerably from his ET days) stabs the tart to death near Mother's (not too rotted) corpse in Mother's bedroom, dressed as mother. Its an "origin" take on how Norman became Mother the Murderer. But alas, it is filmed very, very poorly. It is as if Norman repeatedly stabs the victim in her shoulder until she dies(I assume nobody wanted to come near the actress's heart region, for safety reasons.) As an additive - Fourth of July fireworks outside Mother's window(for the "cinematics" we have come to expect from Psycho.) And...too quietly...Bernard Herrmann's famous screeching strings.

The other flashback murder of the second "pre-Marion" female victim brings us to Norman in a car near the Bates Motel having evidently tried to pick up a local floozie(hooker?) and follow things to completion. But alas, after some preliminary necking, Norman excuses himself, returns dressed as Mother and ...strangles the victim with a pearl necklace. The homage here is to "Frenzy," not Psycho and rather breaks tradition in the wrong way: Hitchcock was a "motif man": Norman is a stabber, not a strangler. That's the territory of Uncle Charlie, Bruno Anthony, and Bob Rusk.

This victim, too, ala Duke in Psycho III, comes to in the car and has to be dispatched in the swamp.

But the "piece de resistance" murders in Psycho IV aren't stabbings. They are poisonings. The poisoning of Mrs. Bates(a young, pretty if strange and cruel Mrs. Bates played by Olivia Hussey) and her loutish boyfriend.

In the ultra-violent tradition of the R rating(as cable allows for), we see Mother and boyfriend die that "ugly way to die" that Sheriff Chambers had spoken of. And its horrible. Frankly, poisoning is one of the most mean and vicious ways to kill a person imaginable, as The Hateful Eight and countless other movies have proven to us. The killer "tricks" the victim, and the victim usually has to die an agonizing death with no means to stop it.

And the death of Young Mrs. Bates -- vomiting out clear liquids from her frozen lungs, her mouth, her nostrils -- is something most profound and sad in Psycho IV. Young Norman stands there and looks into his young mother's eyes as the woman expires, and we FEEL the shrink's phrase -- "matricide is the most horrible crime of all" as the woman dies sadly and accusingly before her son as he cries. We UNDERSTAND how Norman could snap after seeing his mother die at his hand.

Norman kills no one as an adult in Psycho IV. The script was by Joseph Stefano, who wrote the original, and while it is much weaker(Hitch wasn't there to edit it), it proposes Stefano's idea that Norman COULD be cured, could marry and have a child. (Stefano says this is a sequel only to Psycho; the other stories and murders have not occurred.) I'm not so sure. But Psycho IV tries that theory out.

No, the murders in Psycho IV are all FROM "Psycho" -- all from what the psychiatrist told us -- and thus Psycho IV is the most "connected" movie of all to "Psycho." I was disappointed in the "fan fiction" version of the two women killed by Norman before Marion -- it would have been far more fitting for them to be motel guests ,too -- but the poisoning of Mrs. Bates(with her boyfriend as a kind of "less consequential bonus" though he tries to strangle Norman as he dies) is meaningful, tied to the original movie, and the "best" murder in Psycho IV.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

So our candidates:

Best murder, Psycho II: Lila Loomis in the fruit cellar where she escaped death in 1960, graphically with a knife through the mouth and out the back of her head.

Best murder, Psycho III: A previously nude and nubile young lovely is stabbed (while clothed) in a Bates Motel phone booth in a scene with SOME of the power of the shower murder, and some of The Birds in it, too.

Best murder, Psycho IV: A murder referenced both in the book and the movie of Psycho the original: the poisoning of Mrs. Bates by her son, Norman.

...while Lila's death is directly connected to "Psycho" too(the fruit cellar locale), it is fan fiction of a sort, and given how non-graphic Janet Leigh's killing was, this killing of Vera Miles seems rather like a defilement. Only the murder of Mrs. Bates is "from" the Bloch and the Hitchcock. I'd say it should be the winner except:

However: that murder in the phone booth in Psycho III feels like a new additive to the old story: intelligent director Anthony Perkins doesn't have the time or team to match the shower murder, but he conveys some of its fast-cut style, and more of its stabbing brutality. (The last image and sound effect of a phone hanging by a cable while its busy signal blares away is a nice statement of death, as well.)

I give the win to: phone booth stabbing, Psycho III.

BUT: Just look at it. Or the Vera Miles killing. Or even the "official" poisoning of Mrs. Bates. None of them play with the full-on power and style(and FUN) of the seminal two murders in...Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.