A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

You’ll almost certainly have seen Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 early slasher horror classic. And you’ll also probably have seen enough horror sequels in your time to know the score that, if there is one thing that virtually all such follow-ups are guilty of, it’s predictability. The studio will have realised that there’s a market for a certain type of terrifying carnage so they’ll cut and paste those visceral thrills into the sequel. 

So with that in mind, if you haven’t seen Psycho III, why not take this opportunity to pause for a moment and try and work out how you think the third film in Paramount’s desperate attempt to milk the Psycho brand 26 years after the original might open? 

Because trust me. You won’t be able to predict it. 

Ready? 

I mean, there’ll be spoilers ahead. 

Right… 

Psycho III opens with High Melodrama on the Belltower of a Nunnery. Shot in a strikingly visual style that deliberately references Vertigo, we’re immediately plunged into the hysterical world of a suicidal novice. Panicked nuns trying to prevent her from jumping, culminating in a tragic Big Bell accident. 

It’s unexpected and pretty brilliant. And completely unbalances the whole thing because nothing at all in the rest of the film comes remotely close to it. Which isn’t to say that the rest of the film is dreadful: Anthony Perkins – sitting in the directors chair as well as starring as the lead – delivers some genuinely inventive moments, the highlight of which is a bathroom sequence that cleverly subverts the original shower sequence with an injection of the same insanity that drives the opening. The obligatory murders are well shot and about as original as they could be, given the studio brief was clearly “we need to see more innocent women get knifed, that’s what them Psycho-loving kids are clamouring for.” Apparently Perkins was influenced by the Coen Brothers’ recent debut Blood Simple for these scenes, and like the Hitchcock nods, it’s a creative debt that pays off. 

Yet despite all that, it’s just not a good movie. It all falls apart near the end, becoming bogged down in continuity from Psycho II, and the narrative swerves away from the potentially shocking endings it seemed to be setting up and settling for something pretty banal.  

But it benefits, I think, from the fact that it is a horror sequel. We’re so used to horror sequels being retreads that watching one becomes an exercise in spotting those moments where they do something original. Where the incredibly low bar we’ve set for the creepy cash-in is at least jumped. These moments feel praise-worthy, even though you don’t have to take too many steps back to accept the wider perspective that the film really isn’t good. 

No horror sequel quite captures that in the extreme as Psycho III. It’s the most obvious of cash-ins, engendering the lowest of possible expectations. And it has the most striking of original moments that briefly feel impressive – before finally settling down on ultimately not being very good.