Psycho II

Australian director Richard Franklin who helmed the classic Australian exploitation film Patrick and who was inspired tp get into film-making by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was a good choice to direct this belated sequel to that cinematic icon.  Playing the infamous shower scene  from Hitchcock’s film before the credits start makes clear that this film is consciously following in the footsteps of the original, albeit, with a hop, a step and a jump.

Anthony Perkins is back as Norman Bates , who after twenty-two years  incarceration is being released under the watchful eye  of his shrink (Robert Loggia). He returns to the house on the hill and his seedy motel .  Norman gets a job washing dishes at a local diner where he makes friends with a waitress (Meg Tilly) who rather surprisingly agrees to move into the Bates home.  Then weird stuff starts happening and Norman’s mother-complex reasserts itself.

Franklin, with the help of Tom Holland’s inventive screenplay, carefully re-works all the key visual and thematic elements into the production and only in the latter stages does he allow the plot to permute to more modern expectations by upping the slasher quotient. Even so it is relatively restrained in this respect. This is perhaps its problem  - it sticks too close to the original in form but is a bit too knowingly B-grade in execution to recapture that film’s creepy tone, at times coming close to comedy.  As a homage, Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake was much more effective.

Still, for fans of the original, Psycho II is an entertaining revisit to the very dysfunctional Bates' family home. . 

 

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