FRANCHISE ME: PSYCHO II

Excellent article and excellent sequel. One of my favorites (not just horror sequels, either).

Good work. I wish I could say more, but even though I'm a fan of Franklin's (Road Games is absolutely one of my favorite movies), I haven't seen Psycho 2 in like a dozen years or so. I have however, seen Psycho 3 recently, and really, that's where the slasher trend reverse infected the original carrier. It's also positively dripping in barely restrained homoeroticism, which it's probably it's finest asset, truth be told.  

I may steal that for me article.

 

Another excellent piece!  I truly can't wait for the next three.

I always admired II. Thematically it's the perfect sequel the original could have ever had and I agree that it should have stopped there. Turning Norman into a protagonist and victim was a good move. The only thing I dislike about it is opening with the shower scene, that felt completely unnecessary.

I need to see III again sometime, I don't remember much beyond the overt Hitchcock homages and Fahey's lamp penis action which gave it a touch of the benign bizarre the felt in line with Hitchcock's humor. It's most of the flick being a standard 80s horror slasher that turned me off. Never saw IV, unfortunately saw the remake.

 

 

I have always thought "Frenzy" is one of Hitchcock's most underrated movies. It was his attempt to stay  relavent in the proto-slasher horror cinema of the 70's. He breaks his "what you don't see is scarier than what you do see" rule that everyone associates him with. It is very graphic, and very scary. 

 

Psycho II is my favorite of the franchise. Probably because it's also the first one I saw. Hits a lot of the right spots for me. Perkins' performance, the lovely Goldsmith score, and the great direction.

 

IV is not so bad. It has Elliot in full "Mother" garb jump into a car, start strangling a girl and say, in "Mother's" voice, "DRIVE, WHORE!"

Holy shit, that shovel .gif.  We really fucked up not including that in Geriatrocities.

 

Such good work, Josh.  I read these all religiously despite the fact that I've seen about two of the covered films and am generally super anal about avoiding spoilers.  

Thought the exact same thing.

It makes you wonder how much more explicit Hitchcock's thriller work might have gotten if he had lived another decade....

 

I think it would have gotten very graphic. Hitch was both rightly and wrongly portrayed as a mainstream workman. Rightly in the sense that he was just out to goose us and push buttons and entertain. Wrongly in the sense that you can't be a fucking genius when that is your goal. As noted with FRENZY, I think he would have continued to evolve with the times. He was the kind of director who, were he alive now, would have jumped all over the Red camera and 3D and whatever. I don't think you'd hear Hitchcock bemoaning how the past was so much better, because he knew that audiences evolve and there is no "right way" in art. If your goal is to reach the most people you have to know what the most people will be affected by. And that's why his career lasted 50 years.

Right on. Plus he already did 3D with DIAL M FOR MURDER. I'd actually like to see it in that format one day, maybe soon during this 3D phase WB might do a 3D-blu ray release. They did re-release the 3D version in 1982 during that revival.

I love Psycho II. It really did fuck me up when I was younger watching it. The wait completely keeps you guessing whether Norman is doing it or not is without a doubt the genius behind the movie. I recall the scene when Norman takes Tilly's character into the bedroom and he watches after her through the night. I was really with Norman there in the paranoia, ready to see Mother's corpse head pop out of the door.

While they would have been exactly the same, I can easily see him putting out something akin to De Palma's "Hitchcockian" thrillers like Dressed To Kill or Blow Out.

 

I think we would have seen Hitch go balls out with a few horror movies if he had been alive and kicking when the 80s horror boom started.  He would have relished it.

 

Hitchcock hated Dressed to Kill, and there's a great point in the recent book Shock Value about how he deliberately sets the graphic murder in Frenzy right next to a more traditional Hitchcockian suspense sequence, as if to illustrate the more effective type of filmmaking - craft, composition and editing vs. a long single shot of a dead girl with her tits and tongue hanging out.

Dennis Franz's dangling cigarette of pre-death surprise is an abiding memory of this one. I haven't watched this in over a decade - I really need to rectify that.

 

 

 

Would have been great to see some super violent/overtly sleazy flicks from fat old geezer Hitch. I picture him having a heart attack while giving direction to Linnea Quigley

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did he catch an early screening?  Dressed To Kill hit theaters three months after Hitchcock died.

There's a lot of errors in "Shock Value". It was actually OBSESSION Hitch hated.

 

http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2011/12/guest-book-review-jason-zinomans-shock.html

I can see that.

Well, that's embarrassing. The book takes that as a first-person account of Landis, who says he was there.

That said, some of those "corrections" are pretty thin:

 

 

 

I wish it was true. DRESSED TO KILL is the better movie for him to hate.  I love the idea of him seeing it at an early screening and instead of anointing an acolyte as his successor he is disgusted by it.

Edited by Fat Elvis - 1/18/12 at 10:50pm

"it is hard to go wrong with Dennis Franz playing a scumbag"

 

Amen.

Well that's just sad if true. Robertson and Bujold running towards each other each thinking something different, Herrmann firing on all cylinders, the airport lights throbbing in the back, holy shit the tension. That's pure Hitchcockian gold right there. I'm going to go ahead and assume the old master thought DePalma was a bit TOO good, thus the comment.