Psycho III

Poor mad Norman Bates is back, this time directed by his onscreen creator,  Anthony Perkins.  The results are not as good as you might hope they would be but they’re not that bad either.   Perkins follows a similar strategy to Richard Franklin in the first sequel, Psycho II, recycling most of the key elements of Hitchcock’s original film and even inserting scenes taken from both to remind us what has gone before.

As we saw in the previous film, Norman has completely flipped, killing his natural mother and taking her corpse upstairs  to his adopted mother’s bedroom. Even so, he’s pretty good at maintaining the illusion of sanity.  That is until a noviate nun (Diana Scarwid) who has tried to kill herself turns up at the Bates Motel shortly preceded by a shiftless would-be rock-n-roll singer, Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey). Pretty soon Norman’s fragile world is unravelling and the butcher’s knife is out again.

There’s not a whole lot between the two sequels, the plot is more or less the same, only the characters that drive it are different with exception of carry-overs like the local sheriff and the owner of the diner where Norman briefly worked in Psycho II.  Perkins, making his debut as a director, is less of a film geek than Franklin so there are fewer knowing allusions to the original and he concentrates on telling the story and making Norman much more of a sympathetic character.  Given the schlocky nature of the tale he is effective enough although as director he allows his acting self a little too much freedom, the result being some rather histrionic acting on Perkins’ part.  There are however a couple of nice touches such as the blackly comic one when the  sheriff thrusts his hand into the ice chest where Norman has hidden one of his victims and doesn't notice even that some of the cubes he's popping into his mouth have blood on them and a climactic confrontation between the sleazy Duane and Norman when he visits Cabin 12 where former has lured him in order to blackmail him.

Sequels usually follow the law of diminishing returns but Psycho III holds its ground with its predecessor.

 

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