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The Mick Garris Project: Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990 - TV)

 


It kind of worked out that I had recently purchased the Psycho collection on BluRay and thus owned the first film in HD, which might be the last thing I watch in HD in this series, in my Mick Garris project and was naturally at that point in my rewatch of the series (in short, Psycho is great, Psycho II is very good, Psycho III is surprisingly solid). Psycho IV: The Beginning was a made-for-TV movie produced by Showtime in 1990, towards the beginning of them spending a large chunk of the 90s producing low budget original genre films and projects tying to popular film IPs. At this point Mick had directed a few episodes of anthology shows like Amazing Stories and Freddy’s Nightmares (one of the better episodes I’ve seen of that series, but I’ll get to that after I watch through the films/tv films/miniseries down the line) and was known to have some friends in the broad Amblin world from his time shooting behind the scenes documentaries for their films and writing a number of episodes for Amazing Stories.

I will say I was pleasantly surprised with how nice this film looked for a TV film of its era, it is not IT which also starred Olvia Hussey, but it is a totally serviceable job with some nice neon light work that recalls Psycho III, it won’t blow anybody’s minds but it is restrained and capable, and doesn’t try too much to ape Hitchcock shots like the other sequels do to distracting effect for the type of films they were.

The decision which we saw repeated in Bates Motel many years later to “sex-up” Norma Bates is weird, and it certainly makes all the incest-suggestion heavy scenes all that much more uncomfortable that they decided to hire somebody much younger and prettier than the prior suggestions about the character have been. Casting a very British and fairly wooden Hussey would not have been my first choice, personally. Also the entire premise is quite hokey, Norman calling into a radio show, but CCH Pounder is a fantastic choice for a voice that would grab radio listeners instantly and Warren Frost is great as the trashy, cash in psychologist.

While he isn’t given much to do for the vast majority of the film but pace around his kitchen and talk on a wired phone, Anthony Perkins hasn’t forgotten how to play the character of Norman Bates in his interludes and he does a fine job, even if they obviously asked him to ham it up a little bit. He does better than the actor put in the thankless role of Young Norman throughout the film who just has a dead look on his face most of the time and isn’t given a great deal of dialog. These scenes are, I don’t know, fine, they are way too incest-y at times for my personal tastes but like they do an okay, far from great, job of depicting how somebody like Norman could get to the point he did and it’s no wonder a series like Bates Motel could take that basic premise and come up with multiple well made seasons about the idea. I feel like there’s a lot more interesting things that could have been done beyond the pretty by-the-numbers backstory

It is a film that is probably better and more interesting to watch that a made-for-Showtime film has any right to be, so for that I definitely give it a passing grade for Mick’s debut even if not an enthusiastic one.



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