1986 sequelRating: 5/20
Plot: It's more silliness at the Bates Motel, a motel only slightly less spooky than the one I work at. Norman's apparently still out and about, hitting on nuns and attracting drifters. A nosey newspaper reporter comes along to find a story. Stuffed birds watch it all with their dead eyes.
I had no plans to watch this movie, but I thought it was cool to watch a movie about a motel while working at a motel and couldn't pass up the opportunity. I've wondered why the motel I work at hasn't been closed down. Same question needs to be asked about the Bates Motel, right? I've not seen the second movie, but I just couldn't take my eyes off this thing after all the nun craziness at the beginning, the arm-sewing insanity, the taxidermy, and the dancing boy. You get the iconic setting imagery, a few creepy moments, and a soundtrack with all kinds of nifty electronic sounds. You also get a shower scene and an attempt to replicate one of the original's goofier scenes--the falling-down-the-stairs scene. Perkins is particularly wooden, probably because he had to perform double duty playing is iconic character and directing this nonsense. Not sure who wrote this but he apparently had trouble figuring out if he wanted a comedy or a horror flick. It's a little bit of both as a lot of the scenes are played for giggles while other scenes that aren't supposed to be funny at all end up funny anyway. And I believe the line "You can twirl my baton" is in the movie somewhere. That's the only "note" I took on this movie, but a precursory Google search makes me wonder if it was actually in the movie at all. Maybe I was dreaming or maybe one of my motel's guests said that to me at one point. Nevertheless, Hitchcock wouldn't have allowed that line to be in his movie or in the real life of somebody watching one of his movies. Oh, and Jeff Fahey's in this movie! The guy's ubiquitous! I just checked and he's got eleven movies coming out this year alone. Eleven! That's more than the amount of lesson plans I'll write this school year. One more thing: this helps seal a work-in-progress theory I have about the posteriors of nuns. I don't feel like getting into that now though.