Skip to main content

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.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Green Mile (1999) - Syrupy Collection of Great Character Actors

  The Green Mile was a film that was in a regular rotation for my mom and stepdad when I was growing up, so I saw it many times in the late 90s and early 00s. My love of Stephen King mostly comes from my dad, who owned the first King book I ever read myself in late elementary school (Skeleton Crew) and numerous others I looked at on his shelf all the time and showed me miniseries like IT and The Stand. However, my mom contributed a little bit too with the likes of Creepshow and some of his other 80s adaptations and of course The Green Mile. So I figured why not revisit it since I own it? My biggest problem with The Green Mile is one I share with its spiritual sibling in The Shawshank Redemption which is that it is just very sentimental and sometimes even downright corny. Movies seemingly designed to make middle aged dads get in touch with their emotions by layering that syrup on thick. There’s a place for that and I understand why people really enjoy it, but it just simply isn’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) - Funny, Fun, and a Little Bit Insufferable

  The late 00s and early 10s were a pretty good time to be somebody who loved cult horror films with a sense of humor. You had the likes of Trick r Treat, Drag Me to Hell, and my favorite at the time which was The Cabin in the Woods. Whether it was on pay cable or early streaming, the film became a regular fixture in the years I mostly just spent my time frequently re-watching the same movies and drinking far too much beer. Because of that, I’ve gone some years without watching it very frequently cause I got kind of burnt out on it in my 20s but I had this former Blockbuster rental Bluray copy that cost less than 2 bucks so I figured why not see how well the film holds up? The thing that hasn’t held up so well is how smugly in love with its own dialog and cleverness the film is in a way that immediately signals that Joss Whedon was a writer on it. There’s a certain too cute quality to a lot of Whedon’s projects that have made me not like them as much as other people do, sorry to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (1944) - Uncomfortably Stalinist, Visually Astounding

  I know that I usually start reviews with a personal anecdote of some sort, but this one is kind of a head scratcher. My only real ties in my life to the Soviet Union are just a lifelong, morbid fascination with the Cold War era and rocking a hammer and sickle pin on my backpack as middle schooler into punk rock. However, I do like a lot of Soviet era cartoons which are a special kind of surreal and I really like some film movements of Soviet states on the fringe, and what Soviet films I’ve seen often have very strong and striking visuals. So when I saw that Ivan the Terrible Parts 1 and 2 were on Max, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to do something different for this blog even if it might be a bit shorter than my typical review. Obviously, the biggest and most valid criticism of the film is how deeply unsubtle it is in most ways, but particularly when it comes to defending and propagating the ideals of Stalinism. As a member of the left, I’m well aware there are factions t...
Post a Comment
Read more