Format: Blu-Ray from Marengo-Union Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.
It’s dangerous to make a sequel for a classic movie. No matter what, your film is going to be compared with the classic. There are rare exceptions where the sequel meets or exceeds the original--The Godfather part II or Aliens, for instance, but more often than not, you’re going to end up with Highlander II: The Quickening or Exorcist II: The Heretic. So it was brave to do Psycho II a good couple of decades after Hitchcock’s film. To make a sequel like this, you’re going to have to dive into some lore, make a few changes to the original story that might rub people the wrong way, and find a way to keep the audience guessing when they are already sure they know how the story is going to go.
With Psycho II, the problems are legion. All of the problems of making a sequel are there, and there are a number of additional issues as well. How do you make Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) sympathetic again? Since your audience is almost certainly going to know the classic shock ending of the original film, how do you give them new shocks? Since the audience already knows the story about Norman and his mother, how do you make something new that people will accept?
