A mentally disturbed man, who roomed with the late Norman Bates at a psychiatric facility, inherits the infamous Bates Motel after his death and attempts to fix it up as a respectable business.
Similar titles
Reviews
Opening scene, a black-and-white sunrise over the Bates Motel, is a good, atmospheric touch, until we realise the footage was lifted from Psycho II, getting things off to a cheap, tacky start.Some good set designs are about all this turkey has going for it, as Bates' former asylum roommate is willed the Bates Motel, by the now deceased (in this film, anyway) Norman Bates. What could possibly go wrong with an ex-mental patient returning to the scene of a very violent crime? And I'm sorry to keep repeating myself and bringing this up, however, the Bates Motel should have been demolished decades earlier, not only because of the murders which occurred there, but also because the highway built in the 1950s (mentioned by Norman Bates in the original Psycho) routed traffic away from that road.Wide eyed, boyish looking Bud Cort is awful, and the screen writing in this Psycho meets wannabe Twilight Zone was as bland as could be. I don't have a problem with there being no murder, and no act of on- screen violence committed, what I do have a problem with was the inept screen writing, killing off Bates for the sake of a proposed weekly television series, and for what? So we can watch Cort's character mundanely and uneventfully running to motel? Or watch as he slowly goes mad, and is driven to kill, in extremely predictable fashion?
I don't understand the low ratings for this little gem of a movie. So what if it ignores the psycho sequels and changes up a few things from the original psycho. It's still a great movie. Good acting and a nice little ghost story mystery thrown in. I especially loved Bud Cort as Alex. I am a huge fan of the original Psycho and it's sequels and I think this is a great addition for any psycho fan or even someone who has never seen psycho. It was great revisiting the Bates Motel all covered in cobwebs and neglected. Gave it a nice creepy feeling. I just upgraded to a better copy of this from ioffer (they are also selling it on amazon) and it's a fairly good picture quality. Don't let the bad reviews keep you from giving this movie a try.
I was on this site and appalled to see the nasty comments about the movie. It was a rather good "closing chapter" to the Bates legacy. Anthony Perkins and his "mother" would be proud of it. So all of you people out there need to take a shower. a cold one and get over the fact that you as movie consumers are inferior to a normal person. I mean come on now i was 4 when i first watched it and even then i was smart enough to aknowledge "a great movie" when i saw one. For TV it was a edge of your seat thriller. You guys must be mad when u type awful comments like that. But as norman would say "we all go a little mad sometimes".Josh Atterbury
I've been getting bugged for years for copies of this film -- since it hardly ever got played after it bombed on TV back in '87. As a piece of Psycho history, I taped it in '87 and foolishly let people know that I had a copy.... I'm so glad Sci-fi is airing it so I don't have to sit through it anymore. Made as a potential pilot for an anthology series, the movie flopped badly and a show never materialized. Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates himself) boycotted the production. Not that he really needed to, since the public hated it as much as he did....I'd like to say this film is awful. But I can't really say that, since I've seen so much worse. But as an attachment to the Psycho films, it IS awful. It ignores the two sequels that had been made and even makes mistakes based on information from the original. Bud Cort gives a mind-numbingly dumb performance as the friend of Norman's who inherits the motel after his death. You never really have sympathy for him 'cause he just plays it so dumb. Lori Petti, who I usually love, is rather annoying as the squatter that befriends him. She does an okay job with her part, but the problem is that all the main parts were poorly written. We get more than half of the way through the movie, focusing on Cort and Petti trying to get the motel running again, and then we enter the first of the Twilight-Zone-ish stories: a woman who wants to kill herself is befriended by some strange teens. The writing and acting in this segment isn't bad, but after sitting through the Cort/Petti story, it hardly seems worth it. There's really only one creepy segment in the film -- the presence of the woman in black at Mrs. Bates funeral (but the discovery of her corpse is nonsense, since they found her body in the basement in the original film). The whole Jake Bates story seemed like it was jammed in so they could add a few more scares, though the scares fell flat. And the black-and-white segment at the film's climax could have been great -- if they hadn't went the Scooby-Doo unmask-the-villain route -- but as another reviewer wrote, it seemed to be the inspiration for "Scream 3" (which I love, by the way). Though the film is a piece of Psycho history, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone, except maybe fans of the actors -- even then it wouldn't get a strong recommendation....